BEMOSI AANDEG
(WALKING CROW)
ANISHINABE
Allumette Island Ojibway
Kichesipirini Band
MEMBER
Casco Bay Meti Society
Metis Eastern Tribal Indian Society of Maine
Origins My father was a French Canadian traveling stage magician named Emile Brin, but he was really a Brazeau by blood because his mother had an affair with her sister's husband. Emile changed his name several times during his travels as a magician, and was also known as Don Juan Cardoza and Pierre LeBlanc. Emile was directly descended from American Indians from several tribes or bands, including the Ojibway (Anishinabe), Abenaki, Huron, Nipissing, Pawnee, Algonkin and Mohawk. However, the American Indian ancestors are so far back (five to ten generations) that we do not have enough Indian blood to qualify as Indian according to the white man blood quatuum protocols accepted by the largely Christian American Indians of today.
On his mother’s side (Amanda Gauthier dite St. Germain), he was descended through her father from a Skidi Pawnee man (Wolf band) born about 1660 and an Algonkin woman, both French prisoners in Quebec until they were freed. A raiding party of French soldiers and their Cree Indian allies had captured the Pawnee on the High Plains and took them to Boucherville, New France (Canada) as prisoners. When these Pawnee were set free years later, they stayed in Canada with a friendly tribe, the Abenaki. Intermarriages with the French turned my ancestors into Meti’s, those with mixed French and Indian blood. For several generations, my ancestors there were listed in Canadian census records as ‘Pawnee.’ The Pawnee man was called ‘Panic Grass’ in Canadian records.
Amanda Gauthier's mother, Aurelie Desroches, was descended from an Algonkin man called Jacques Gagnon, born at the Chateau Richer in 1666 and adopted by a Frenchman named Robert Gagnon. Many Indian children were adopted by the French who came to New France as part of the Jesuit master plan to assimilate the Indians to French ways. Aurelie was also descended from an Allumette Island Ojibway named Mehwatta (aka Marie Bourdon). Mehwatta married the Coureur des Bois Jean Cadieux, who sacrificed his life to save his wife and several of her tribesmen from an Iroquois attack at the Place of the Seven Falls on Calumet Island, in May of 1709. "Cadieux's Lament,' written by Jean Cadieux as he lay dying made him a legend among the Coureurs des Bois, and a monument to this deed can still be seen in the area. The fact that the Algonkins used to mine pipestone on Calumet Island for their medicine pipes has given the name 'Calumet' to medicine pipes today.On my father’s father’s side (Brazeau), my father was descended from a Shaking Tent medicine man named Etienne Pigarouiche, an Allumette Island Ojibway of the Kichesipirini (Great River) Band. Etienne was infamous among the Jesuits as an apostate because he faked a number of conversions to Christianity. At each 'conversion,' the Jesuits gave Etienne muskets, which he used against the attacking Mohawks. He and his friend, Paul Tessouat II, the one-eyed Chief of the Kichespirini Band at Allumette Island, fought against the conversion of their tribe to Christianity. Paul threatened the lives of all of his band who had converted to Christianity, so they all left and went to Trois Rivieres. In 1641, the Mohawks overran the under-manned Kichesipirini fort and most of the tribe merged with the Christian Weskarini Band under Sachem Charles Pachirini at Trois Rivieres. Etienne and Paul were thrown out of the tribe for refusing to convert. Etienne married Marguerite Oupitaouabamoukou, another Allumette Island Ojibway, in 1639.
Grandfather Brazeau was also descended from a Nipissing (First Nation) woman named Marie Matanakiwan, born at the Ile de Montreal in 1698. Marie's grandmother was an Ojibway from the Sault St. Marie area. Catherine married Jacques Hery II dit Duplante at Oka on 18 Aug 1718. Oka was generally known as Lake of Two Mountains until the Jesuits turned it into a sanctuary for Christian Indians. Grandfather Brazeau was also descended from the same Mehwatta of Allumette Island as Grandmother Gauthier. After the death of her first husband, Jean Cadieux, Mehwatta married a fur trader named Antoine Quenneville at Longueuil on 26 January 1710. So I have Mehwatta's DNA from two lines.
Grandfather Brazeau was also descended from a Huron named Roch Manitoueabeouich and his Abenaki wife, Outchibahanouk Banoukoueou. Roch Manitoueabeouich was born in a Huron village on the shores of Lake Huron in 1599. Roch worked for several years as a guide and interpreter for Olivier Letardif, setting up fur trading posts for Samuel Champlain's company. Roch was baptized in his village on 14 November 1636 and received the Christian name of 'Roch.' At the time of Roch's conversion, the Hurons were typically murdering or exiling those who converted to Christianity and since Roch's last name is Ojibwa and not Huron, Roch was probably adopted by a Christian Algonkin band such as the Weskarini. In 1639, he gave his ten-year old daughter, Ouchistauichkoue, to his good friend Olivier Letardif to be schooled by Ursuline nuns and raised in a good French family. She was given the Christian name of Marie Olivier. When the girl was almost fifteen years old, she was married to Letardif's good friend, the Coureur des Bois Martin Prevost. Roch and his wife settled with a Huron band at Sillery. His wife was born into a band of Abenaki camped along the Becancour River in 1602.For those descended from more than one tribe who wish to honor their ancestors, it is customary to choose one of the tribes to identify with, and at first I chose the Pawnee. This was due to the theology of the star gods they had developed, which was close to some of the beliefs I had come to on my own. However, between being unable to discover the name of my Pawnee ancestor and being told by the Pawnee Nation that only descendents of those Pawnee who had let themselves be herded in the prisons called Reservations could call themselves Pawnee (my ancestor had been in Canada at the time), I decided that I should look elsewhere among my Indian ancestors. I did, however, really like the Pawnee empahsis on the importance of dreams for spiritual guidance. In the end, I have decided to identify myself as an Ojibway (Anishinabe). I have discovered that I have far more Ojibway blood than any other tribe, and I know who my Anishinabe ancestors were. Many of the things I liked about the Pawnee are also true of the Ojibway, including their emphasis on the importance of dreams.
I was kidnapped from my family as an infant, and didn't know I had American Indian ancestry until I reached the age of 53. I was raised as a white man; however, an urge for an alternative spirituality drove me to become the High Priest of an Alexandrian Wiccan Coven (Dragonstar Circle) in Baltimore in 1974. During my time as a Witch, I studied the Magick (Medicine) of many cultures. My research included many types of shamanism, voodoo, ceremonial magick, the Kaballah, Kundalini Yoga and alchemy. I had many dreams and visions about the nature of the spiritual worlds, especially of the Dragon. Our coven became a group of serious occultists, and we had little patience with New Agers. When I was approached by outsiders who said they were into Wicca, I typically asked them when they had finished reading their first one hundred books on magick, and I rarely heard from them again. By the time my coven ended in 1985, it bore little resemblance to the Wicca from which it had descended, and even less to the New Age watered-down type of Wicca that was spreading like a cancer across the U.S. From 1996 to 1999, I was Chief of the Red Dragon Alchemical Society, where I pursued the Great Work of spiritual transformation.
I also have a half-brother, John Running Deer, who was born in Nova Scotia and has the same father and thus the same American Indian heritage. Running Deer is a Medicine Man for the inter-tribal Wollomanuppoag Medicine Society in Massachusetts and the elected Chief of an inter-tribal group connected with the Odanak Reservation in Quebec.
Non-Reservation Indians do not pass down their Indian names as family names, but rather take them in the fashion common to Indians in the old days. I took my name, Walking Crow, and my Medicine Power, the Crow, from dreams of the Crow. The Dragon and the Crow have much in common, including their association with the Void beyond the stars and their role as Guardian of the Gate between the worlds.
The stars in my logo are in the shape of the constellation that many tribes call the 'the women,' which the white man calls the Pleiades. This constellation's rise on the eastern horizon heralds the arrival of spring, and at the first rolling thunder thereafter the sacred Medicine Bundle is opened. The ancients taught that one of the women was not always seen because she alone among her sisters came down to earth and married a mortal. She was the Star who fell to Earth, in whose memory Grandfather Fire burns in the center of the circle.
Most American Indian traditions are relatively simple, and modern Indians are suspicious of any ‘Indian teachings’ that are too detailed or complex. This especially applies to the many supposedly “ancient Indian teachings” with which New Agers and Indian wannabes have flooded bookstores and the Internet. Research shows, however, that there are two distinct types of tradition, depending on the tribe’s history as nomadic or sedentary. Those tribes that managed to stay relatively stable in one area over a long period of time tended to develop complex religious ideas, while those who didn’t developed more simple ideas. One of the best known examples of a complex set of Indian teachings today are contained in the many books written by Carlos Castaneda; the teachings he revealed from the Yaqui Tribe of Mexico and Arizona were developed over hundreds of years. Among the Plains Indians, only the Pawnee enjoyed a long period of undisturbed sedentary living. This occurred between the tribe’s movement north into the Plains between 900 and 1200 and the arrival of the white men in the 1600's. As a result, the Pawnee developed a religion and theology of the Star Gods with more depth than one generally finds with other tribes. This development mirrored the culture of the older Canadian tribe known as the Anishinabe, Ojibway or Chippewa.
Walking Crow Photos
THE MEDICINE CROW
