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Indians, a wounded man whom all the local medicine-men had tried in vain to 
cure. Brown Thunder healed him by discovering and removing from his body 
a fragment of a metal arrowhead. He then went down to Badjewinong, near Sault 
Ste. Marie, at the outlet of lake Superior, where a witch was killing a youth who 
had refused to marry her. Through his medicine-power Brown Thunder forced the 
witch to cure the youth. At the same place he was aroused from sleep one night 
to heal a sick girl. Returning to his wigwam he lay down again to sleep. Then 
some one came to him in a dream and bade him return straightway to his home. 
Despite this warning he lingered along the route, endeavouring to cure all the sick 
he encountered. The very next morning he cured a girl at Meshisagi, But when he 
continued his journey some one again spoke to him, saying ‘Brown Thunder, this 
is the end of your power. You have cured the sick too often and we manidos have 
decreed that you shall become the owl kakapshin.’ So Brown Thunder changed to 
an owl. 
Another medicine-unan, Gishibojiwe (“ the horns of the great serpent ”?) who 
lived at Ketchbiatobigang in the United States, also overstrained his powers in 
healing the sick. He aroused the enmity of another medicine-man, who tried to 
cause his death by starvation. Gishibojiwe almost perished, but finally defeated his 
rival by freezing all the land and creating winter conditions. Afterwards, while he 
was hunting, the ice spoke to him by name and said ‘I am melting now, and you 
must melt away likewise.' So Gishibojiwe melted away. He was a wonderful 
medicine-man and obeyed the instructions of his manido ; but he injured the manidos 
by his excessive power. 
There ’was also a medicine-woman named Giweyon, “Thunder retires,” who 
journeyed continually from place to place to heal the sick. Once she failed to cure 
her patient, and her manido advised her that she could succeed in one way only. 
* Place your patient in the shaking-lodge and he will recover. But it is the last 
time you will heal anyone.’ She placed her patient in the shaking-lodge and 
healed him. But the next morning a manido spoke to her soul or shadow, saying 
that she had made a great mistake. ‘I did as I was instructed/ she answered. But 
the manido said ‘ Although you obeyed your instructions you made a great mistake.’ 
That same afternoon she wandered out of the camp, and 1 in trying to leap over a 
fallen pine tree fell and crushed her skull. Her own soul had cured the sick man. 
She had 1 overstrained her manido power” (Mary Sugedub). 
Disobedience to the injunctions that the manido had prescribed in 
the vision also destroyed the Indian’s blessing, and subjected him to the 
wrath of the spiritual world. He incurred this wrath even when he sinned 
unconsciously; if his manido, for example, had forbidden him to eat the 
tail of the beaver, and he partook of this meat unknowingly at a feast, 
either he himself would fall sick and die, or some member of his family, 
unless indeed a medicine-man diagnosed the cause of his malady and pre- 
scribed a suitable remedy. Today very few children fast for a vision, and 
practically all the Indians adhere, nominally at least, to a Christian church. 
Yet they still have faith in the presence of manidos , and the older people 
maintain that an individual who received a visitation and blessing in his 
youth will surely suffer misfortune if he embraces Christianity, because he 
is deliberately casting off his first supernatural guardian and making himself 
the ward of another. 
The experiences of the boys (and girls) during their fasting periods, 
and the beliefs associated with those experiences, undoubtedly exercised 
a profound influence on their later lives. For imaginative children 
especially it was a time of intense stress, such as rarely falls to the lot 
of a European child of corresponding age. Probably it hastened their 
attainment of mental maturity by changing their entire outlook; for, in 
some cases at least, their careers were from this time more or less clearly 
