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feared
you." Their gazes held, and he looked at her with more tenderness than she had ever seen in a
man's
eyes. He lifted a hand to comfortingly brush the hair
away from her face. "The time is coming, very soon,
when the Midnight Fox will seek me out. I pray that my
heart is not too small to understand what he tells me."
HISTORICAL AFTERWORD
Sigmund Freud was not the first person to discover that dreams can give us clues about illness.
Many North American tribes, particularly Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples, believed that dreams
were the language of the soul, and that the unfulfilled desires of the soul, as represented in
dreams, could cause illness, or even death. To make certain this didn't happen, the entire
community worked together to fulfill the dreams of sick people.
Theandacwander , as those of you who readIt Sleeps in Me know, is real.
The only detailed description of this healing ritual comes from Father Gabriel Sagard, who lived
among the Huron tribe from 1623 to 1624. He was part of an apostolic ministry to the Huron and
was very dedicated to the task of converting them to Christianity. In the process, he recorded his
observations, his trials and tribulations, his successes and failures, and published them in 1632.
His book,Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons , was so popular that it had to be reprinted, which
it was in 1636. However, it came out under the new title ofHistoire du Canada , and contained
several elaborations on the original work.
Certainly one of the most spectacular sections ofLe grand voyage is Chapter X, where he
recounts witnessing several sexual healing rituals, particularly theandacwander .
Because he was not a member of the community, Sagard was forbidden to participate, or
even look upon the ritual, but fortunately for us, he watched it through a chink in the walls of a
longhouse.
It is especially interesting to me that Sagard only mentions dances "ordered on behalf of a sick
woman." Did he simply never see theandacwander performed for a sick man, or were sexual
healing rituals largely women's rituals? Jesuit references suggest that men were also cured in this
manner (Thwaites 1896-1901, 17: 179), so it's possible that Sagard only watched ceremonies for
women, which is interesting in and of itself.
In any case, the Huron worked very hard to heal the sick members of their community. Even