Quick Answer
Bear Heart was a traditionally trained Muscogee Creek medicine man, a Road Chief in the Native American Church, and an ordained Baptist minister, and he did not experience those three as a contradiction. His book is warm, plain and completely free of instructions for anything, which is the best decision in it. The word on the cover is the publisher's, not his.
Key Takeaways
- Three traditions in one man, held without strain, which is more common in Oklahoma Native communities than outsiders assume.
- It contains no ceremony instructions, and that restraint is a mark of the teaching rather than an omission.
- Shaman is a Siberian word put on the cover by a publisher, and it does not describe what he was.
- The argument about teaching outsiders is real, has serious people on both sides, and he made his own decision about it.
- People have died at ceremonies run by the untrained. The book's silence about procedure is a safety feature.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
The Wind Is My Mother was published in 1996 by Clarkson Potter, written by Bear Heart with Molly Larkin. It has been in print continuously ever since and has been translated into around a dozen languages, which for a book of this kind is remarkable.
It is part memoir and part teaching. Bear Heart recounts his childhood in Oklahoma, his training, his years of practice, the people he worked with, and alongside those stories he sets out how he thinks a person should conduct themselves.
The tone is conversational and unhurried. There is no system in it, no numbered path, and no attempt at comprehensiveness. It reads the way an old man talks when he has decided to tell you some things and is in no rush about it.
On names: the nation is the Muscogee, also written Mvskoke, and long called the Creek by English speakers. Both forms appear in the literature and on the nation's own materials. Bear Heart's given name was Marcellus Williams; Bear Heart is the name he is known by and the one used here.
Who Bear Heart Was
He was born in 1918 in Okemah, Oklahoma, and died in 2008 at the age of ninety.
He was trained in the traditional ways of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and was among the last people to receive that training in the older manner. He was a Road Chief in the Native American Church, meaning he was qualified to lead its all-night ceremonies. He had Sun Danced with both Northern and Southern Cheyenne people. And he was an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church.
He worked for many years as a spiritual counsellor, including in settings that had nothing to do with any of the above: hospitals, prisons, disaster response, ordinary people's difficulties. A substantial portion of the book concerns that work rather than ceremony.
The History Underneath Oklahoma
The book does not dwell on this and a reader should know it anyway, because it explains why a Muscogee elder was born in Oklahoma at all.
The Muscogee homeland is in what is now Alabama and Georgia. In the 1830s, under the Indian Removal Act, the nation was forced west along the route known as the Trail of Tears, with very large loss of life. What became Oklahoma was designated Indian Territory, and the nations removed there rebuilt governments and communities.
Then came allotment, which broke communal landholding into individual parcels and opened the remainder to settlement, and the boarding school system, which took Native children from their families and punished them for speaking their languages, with the explicit aim of ending the transmission of culture.
Bear Heart was born in 1918, which places his childhood squarely inside the period when that machinery was still running. That he received traditional training at all is a fact about the persistence of his community under conditions specifically designed to prevent it. Vine Deloria Jr's God Is Red is the book to read for the wider argument about what was done and why it matters.
Three Traditions, One Man
The most interesting fact about Bear Heart is the combination, and the book is unfussed about it in a way that many readers find surprising.
He practised Muscogee traditional medicine. He led Native American Church ceremonies, which involve the sacramental use of peyote and combine Native and Christian elements in a pan-tribal form organised in the early twentieth century, partly as a legally defensible framework for practices under pressure. And he was ordained in a Christian denomination and preached in churches.
To a reader accustomed to religions as mutually exclusive memberships, this looks like inconsistency. In Oklahoma Native communities it is ordinary and has been for a century. Families contain all three, individuals hold all three, and the boundaries between them are not policed the way outsiders expect.
Bear Heart addresses this directly, and his position is essentially that he was serving the same thing by different means and that the means available to him were the ones history had put in his hands. Whether that satisfies you probably depends on how much you need traditions to be sealed containers.
There is a temptation for non-Native readers to want the traditional part and to regard the Christian part as contamination, or evidence of colonial damage. Bear Heart did not present it that way, and treating a man's own account of his religious life as false consciousness because it fails to be sufficiently indigenous is its own kind of condescension.
How He Was Trained
The account of his training is one of the more valuable parts of the book because it is so unlike what the market usually offers.
There is no initiation scene, no dramatic transmission, no moment where power is conferred. There is a long apprenticeship consisting largely of being present, watching, fetching things, being told very little, and being expected to notice. Elders do not explain. They let you be there and see whether you pay attention.
Several stories turn on being given a task with no explanation and only understanding years later what it was for. Others turn on being corrected by silence rather than instruction.
This is a recognisable picture of how traditional knowledge is actually transmitted in many places, and it is the exact opposite of what a book can do. Bear Heart seems aware of the irony and does not resolve it.
What the Teachings Actually Are
Readers arriving from the wider body of writing on shamanic practice are often surprised by how ordinary the content is.
Listen before you speak, and listen much longer than feels necessary. Respect what is around you, including things that are not human and things that cannot answer back. Be careful with your word, because giving it obliges you. Do not assume you understand what you are looking at. Keep a sense of humour, which he treats as a spiritual quality rather than a personal trait, and which runs through the whole book.
There is a good deal on healing, and it is notably modest. He does not claim to heal. He describes being an instrument, describes cases that did not work, and is explicit that the outcome is not his to determine.
There is also a strong strand about paying attention to the natural world as a source of information rather than as scenery, which is where the title comes from.
The Title
The wind, in the teaching the title refers to, is not a metaphor for a feeling. It is treated as something that is present, that moves, that arrives and departs, and that a person can be in relationship with.
The move being made is worth naming precisely, because it is easy to sentimentalise. Bear Heart is not saying nature is beautiful and we should appreciate it. He is saying that the wind, the trees and the animals are parties rather than surroundings, that a relationship with them has obligations in both directions, and that a person who has never established such a relationship is missing information other people have.
You can take that as literal, as a disciplined way of paying attention, or as a description of a mode of perception that our vocabulary handles badly. The book does not require you to choose, and it does not argue for the position. It assumes it, which is what people do about things they consider obvious.
The Word on the Cover
The subtitle reads: the life and teachings of a Native American shaman. That word deserves attention.
Shaman is not a Native American word. It comes from the Tungusic languages of Siberia, entered European use through Russian accounts of Evenki practitioners, and was then applied by anthropologists as a general category to religious specialists across unrelated cultures worldwide. Mircea Eliade's comparative study did more than anything else to establish it as a universal type.
Many Native people object to it being applied to their traditions, on the grounds that it flattens specific offices in specific nations into a generic exotic role, and that the word carries a load of outsider expectation. A Muscogee medicine person occupies a defined position within a particular community, with obligations to that community, and is not an instance of a global category.
The word is on the cover because it was 1996 and it sold books. Bear Heart's own vocabulary in the text is different, and readers should notice the gap between what the jacket says and how the man inside it describes himself.
The Co-Writer
The book was written with Molly Larkin, a non-Native student of Bear Heart's, and it belongs to the as-told-to genre.
This is standard for the form and it has consequences. Spoken teaching becomes prose, which requires selection, ordering and smoothing. A collaborator decides what goes in, how episodes are sequenced, and where a story ends. The voice on the page is a joint production even when every sentence originates with the speaker.
The comparison every reader should have in mind is Black Elk Speaks, where the poet John Neihardt's shaping of Black Elk's account has been the subject of decades of scholarship, and where the extent of Neihardt's contribution turned out to be substantially larger than the book suggested.
There is no equivalent controversy here, and Larkin's role is stated openly on the cover rather than concealed. The general caution still applies: you are reading a collaboration, and the smoothness of the prose is evidence of a hand at work.
What the Book Refuses to Give You
Here is the most admirable thing about it, and it is a refusal.
The book describes ceremonies. It does not tell you how to perform them. There are no instructions for building or running a sweat lodge, no protocol for a vision quest, no procedure you could follow. Where a lesser book would supply a numbered method, this one supplies a story about a time something happened and leaves it there.
That restraint is a teaching in itself. Ceremonies in these traditions belong to communities, are conducted by people who have been trained and authorised within those communities, and carry obligations that a reader has not undertaken. Printing the procedure would sever it from all of that and hand it to strangers as a technique.
Compare this with the large market in books that do supply the procedure. Michael Harner's core shamanism, whatever its merits, explicitly abstracts techniques from their cultures on the theory that the method is separable. Bear Heart takes the opposite view by simply declining to write it down.
The Argument About Teaching Outsiders
There is a real disagreement here and readers should meet it properly rather than have it hidden.
Bear Heart taught non-Native students, publicly, for decades, and published this book. That was a deliberate decision and he defended it: that the teachings are needed, that the earth's condition concerns everybody, and that withholding them serves nobody.
Many Native people disagree, and not mildly. In 1993 representatives of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations issued a declaration of war against exploiters of Lakota spirituality, condemning the commercialisation of their ceremonies and naming individuals. The position behind it is that these practices belong to specific peoples, that they were suppressed by law within living memory while being simultaneously appropriated as entertainment, and that selling them to outsiders continues a pattern of extraction.
Both positions are held by serious people with standing to hold them, and it is not a reader's place to adjudicate between Native communities. What a reader can do is know that Bear Heart's choice was contested within his own world, that he made it himself rather than having it made for him by a publisher, and that a non-Native person reading this book is participating in something about which there is genuine disagreement.
Why the Silence Matters
The refusal to print procedures is not merely a matter of propriety, and there is a specific reason to say so plainly.
In October 2009, at a retreat near Sedona, Arizona, three people died and many more were hospitalised after a sweat lodge event run by a non-Native self-help promoter with no traditional training, using a structure and a duration that bore no relation to how such ceremonies are actually conducted. The organiser was convicted of negligent homicide.
That is what happens when ceremony is separated from the people who know how to run it and sold as an intense experience. Heat, duration, hydration, who is watching participants, and who has authority to stop proceedings are all matters of trained judgement, and the training exists for reasons that become obvious only when it is absent.
A plain safety statement. Do not attempt a sweat lodge, a fast, a vision quest or any comparable ceremony on the basis of a book, and do not participate in one run by someone whose training and community authorisation you cannot verify. These practices involve real physical risk, including heat illness, dehydration and cardiac events, and they have killed people in the hands of the unqualified. If you have any cardiovascular, respiratory, metabolic or psychiatric condition, or are pregnant, speak to a clinician first. This article is a book review and is not health guidance.
After 2008
Bear Heart died in 2008. A second book, The Bear is My Father, prepared with Reginah WaterSpirit, was published in 2021 and draws on further material from his teaching.
It functions as a companion rather than a replacement, and readers who found the first book valuable will find more of the same voice in it. Readers who did not will not be converted.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want an account of a traditional practitioner's life from the practitioner rather than from an anthropologist, in a form that makes no claims to be scholarship and does not pretend to.
Read it for the training material, which is a genuinely useful corrective to the dramatic transmission scenes that dominate the popular literature. What Bear Heart describes is years of fetching water and being told nothing.
Read it if you have encountered the medicine wheel or the four directions in a workshop setting and want some sense of what they look like inside a living community rather than in a seminar room.
Do not read it as a manual, because it is not one and was not meant to be. Do not read it as ethnography or history, because it makes no attempt at either. Do not read it as representative of Native American spirituality in general, because there is no such thing; there are hundreds of nations with distinct traditions, and this is one man from one of them. And do not take the word on the cover as his description of himself.
The most transferable thing here is the model of learning. Bear Heart describes an apprenticeship in which almost nothing was explained, tasks were given without reasons, and understanding arrived years later or not at all. Everything about how we now transmit knowledge runs the other way: state the objective, explain the rationale, check comprehension, certify. That method is efficient and it is very good at producing people who can describe a practice and cannot do it. There are things that can only be learned by being present for a long time without being told what you are looking at, and a culture that has forgotten this will keep wondering why its experts are so thin.
Ninety years, three traditions, and no instructions for anything.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Bear Heart?
Marcellus Bear Heart Williams, 1918 to 2008, born in Okemah, Oklahoma, a Muscogee Creek man trained in the traditional ways of his nation. He was also a Road Chief in the Native American Church, an ordained American Baptist minister, and had Sun Danced with Northern and Southern Cheyenne people.
What is The Wind Is My Mother?
His account of his life and teachings, written with Molly Larkin and published in 1996 by Clarkson Potter. It has stayed in print continuously since and has been translated into a dozen languages. It combines autobiography, stories from his practice, and teaching about how to live.
Does the book teach ceremonies?
No, and this is one of the best things about it. It describes ceremonies without providing instructions for performing them, and it does not tell a reader how to run a sweat lodge or conduct a vision quest. It offers teaching about attitude and conduct rather than procedure.
Why does the subtitle use the word shaman?
It is a publisher's word and it does not come from the tradition. Shaman is Siberian in origin, applied to Native American practitioners by outsiders, and many Native people object to it. A Muscogee medicine person is not a shaman, and the word on this cover is a commercial decision about the 1996 market.
How could he be a medicine man and a Baptist minister?
He held both without treating them as a contradiction, and the book explains his reasoning. This is not unusual in Oklahoma Native communities, where traditional practice, the Native American Church and Christian church membership have coexisted in the same families and often the same person for over a century.
What is the Native American Church?
A pan-tribal religious body, formally organised in the early twentieth century, whose ceremonies centre on the sacramental use of peyote. A Road Chief or Road Man leads its all-night meetings. Bear Heart held that office, and its legal status in the United States was itself the subject of a long struggle.
What are the main teachings?
Listening before speaking, respect for what is around you including things that are not human, humility about your own understanding, the seriousness of your word once given, and a persistent sense of humour. They are not exotic and the book does not present them as secrets.
Is it appropriate for non-Native readers?
Bear Heart made that decision himself and taught non-Native students deliberately. Other Native people have opposed teaching outsiders, and the 1993 Lakota declaration against exploitation of their spirituality is the best-known statement of that position. Both are real positions held by serious people, and readers should know the argument exists.
What is the plastic shaman problem?
The phenomenon of people, usually non-Native, presenting themselves as Native spiritual authorities, charging for ceremonies they were never trained to lead, and selling teachings they invented. It has caused real harm, financial and physical, and it is why Native communities are cautious about how their practices circulate in print.
Is it dangerous to attempt these ceremonies?
It can be. In 2009 three people died at a sweat lodge event in Arizona run by a non-Native self-help promoter with no traditional training, and others were hospitalised. Ceremonies conducted by people who do not know what they are doing have killed participants, and the book gives no instructions for a reason.
What is the writing like?
Conversational, plain and warm, because it is spoken material shaped by a co-writer into prose. It is very easy to read and it is not a work of scholarship. Readers wanting analysis of Muscogee history or religion should go elsewhere and use this for what it is.
Is there a second book?
Yes. The Bear is My Father, drawing on further material and prepared with Reginah WaterSpirit, was published in 2021, thirteen years after his death. It is a companion to the first book rather than a replacement for it.
Listen longer than is comfortable
Of everything in this book, one instruction costs nothing and can be started today. In your next real conversation, do not begin composing your reply while the other person is still speaking. Wait until they have finished, then wait a little longer, and only then answer. It sounds trivial. Try it three times and notice how much of your ordinary listening turns out to have been rehearsal. Bear Heart spent years fetching water and being told nothing, and what he learned in that time was mostly this.
Sources & References
- Bear Heart, with Molly Larkin (1996). The Wind Is My Mother: The Life and Teachings of a Native American Shaman. Clarkson Potter.
- Bear Heart, with Reginah WaterSpirit (2021). The Bear is My Father. Synergetic Press.
- Deloria, V. Jr. God Is Red, for the broader argument about Native religion and its treatment.
- Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, 1993.
- Reporting and court records relating to the 2009 sweat lodge deaths near Sedona, Arizona.
- Histories of the Muscogee Creek Nation, removal, allotment and the boarding school system.
- Scholarship on the Native American Church and its legal history in the United States.