FROM PAWAWS TO PARK AVENUE

...Like that, I take it," he said...

...I gave a brief outline of Pawaw technique to my psychiatrist acquaintance...

...Mommy fishie' might have been a whale...

...he asked...

...The men hunted and fished a little, slept a great deal, and ate omnivorously when there was food in the kettle...

...Authoritative sources tell us that the Pawaws were, next to the sachems, the richest people in the tribe...

...If the latter got well, there was a great celebration, attended by all the Pawaws who went away with some more furs...

...When the patient had been discharged by the Pawaw, he was visited by an emissary from the local sachem who collected what the Pawaw had left behind...

...Otherwise the incantations wouldn't work...

...He said, of course, that these poor devils were hopelessly superstitious...

...He had heard that the Algonquins were on an earlier wave of immigration than the more warlike and better organized Iriquois who were their ancient enemies, and, besides, anthropology was not his field...

...We have a description of their racket in the writings of Thomas Mayhew, Jr., son of the first proprietor and Governor of the island, and himself the first successful missionary to the American Indians, the claims of the admirers of John Eliot to the contrary nothwith-standing...

...The Calvinist settlers were quite upset by the improvidence of some of the Indian braves who went so far as to gobble clown the seed corn collected by the squaws for the next planting, but after the whites had seen a Paw-aw-3achem combination in action, they became more tolerant of the rank and file habit of consuming anything around the wigwam, and quickly...

...Roared like a bear,' " I said...

...These aborigines lived in wretchedly constructed, over-heated, over-crowded wigwams...

...So if you're in the neighborhood of Park Avenue and the Fifties on your next trip to New York, and you hear strange roaring sounds issuing from some of those swank apartments, blame the Indian Pawaws of three centuries ago on Martha's Vineyard, Mass...

...Sure...

...The Pawaw Racket The life of these Indians was a routinized round of alternating feast or famine, a pawky and insecure existence under the whips of superstition and fear—fear of the elements, fear of the sachems, but, most of all, fear of the smart Pawaws and their dark sorceries...

...Must have been more to their technique than roaring and imps...

...Cooper's Deerslayer...

...They were for the most part poor people living on an island rich in natural resources which their lack of adequate tools and techniques kept them from exploiting...

...These plain folks were members of a subsidiary tribe of the great Algonquin Confederacy...

...Whales and things...

...These proletarian redmen were paying tribute to the four sachems who lorded it over this 20-mile long, eight mile wide island and to the Pawaws, their medicinemen and priests who played a larger part in the life of the tribe than did the civil government...

...Not howled, roared...

...The Vineyard is abundant in grapes, fruits, and seafood, in the interior there is good farming land, and the climate is as close to ideal as the Chamber of Commerce says it is...

...Not Interested, At First When finally the Pawaw was convinced that the patient's assets were running low, the big show was put on...

...And then, to my surprise, he came back to the Pawaws...

...Nothing to that imp technique, though...

...So they dreamt about whales, and whales suckle their young...

...If the patient's financial situation proved to be satisfactory, the Pawaw then impressed upon the distracted one the necessity for having absolute faith in the ability of the medicineman to exorcise the evil...

...Here was no indication of the idyllic life of Rous-vseau's "Noble Savage," of Longfellow's lyric lovers...

...Though I must say that roaring business might be effective...

...He was not interested...

...You remember the song, 'Three iddie fishies and the Mommy fishie too.' " "That's it...

...Yet among the 3,000 Indians who were here when the handful of settlers came over from the ("ape Cod mainland, diseases of all sorts from malnutrition to tuberculosis were raging, and mental ailments were apparently as high as they are among our neurotic rich today...

...An obvious manifestation of the mother complex...

...Then the Pawaw would release his pet imp in the shape of a fly or a garter snake to go pick on the enemies of the sick man...

...I was thinking of these Pawaws when I ran into a vacationing Park Avenue psychiatrist the other day on a dirt road that used to be the Indians' trail to the great Dancing Ground, where under the aegis of the medicinemen the braves put on solo strip dances to the vast admiration of the swaying squaws...

...They would move from one refuse heap to build another...

...How was it this Mayhew said they howled...

...It would be quite impressive...

...They would put the patient down on a pallet of furs in the consulting wigwam and tell him to narrate to the Pawaw the dreams he'd been having...

...The Pawaw would pray to the particular god among th-o ,'57 that the Indians worshipped who had charge of the patient's ailment, "roaring like a bear," as Mayhew has it, and writhing around the floor of the tent...

...If I'm not mistaken, the whale is a mammal, suckles its young and all that...

...Hmm," he murmured, "might be something in that...

...The profession of faith having been extracted from the distrait patient or his frightened relatives, the Pawaws then began to do th-'ir stuff...

...I decided that I might just as well start with the plain people of this island who were here centuries before the first white settlers came in 1642...

...They set up evil-smelling, disease breeding, rural slums in the midst of a beautiful New England countryside...

...Their patients* dreams, however, seemed to be mainly concerned with fishing...

...The squaws scratched with paleolithic instruments to plant a little corn, some beans, and squash...

...This went on for what Mayhew describes as "many, many visits" at so many pieces of fur, so many pounds of fish, or whatever, per call...

...I suppose so," I said...

...When a member of the tribe gave signs of mental distress he was taken to a Pawaw who first examined him as to the state of his canoes on the beaches and the height of his pile of furs in his wigwam, canoes and furs being the symbols of wealth for these poor people who had never heard about bank notes or collateral...

...It's all simple enough...

...I dropped the subject, and then we talked about the campaign and how well Dewey was doing and how all his patients were Dewey women, and how worn out he was after one of the busiest years of his practice...

...Grrr, grrrr...

...He kept silent for a moment and then suddenly gave out a low roaring sound...

...Yes, plenty of whales...

...I wonder how those Pawaws handled it...

...Very interesting...

...You say they had them tell their dreams ?" "Yes, they went thoroughly into that...

...If the patient got worse, that was because he had not fully surrendered himself to the Pawaw, and being a skeptic, he had been taken over by the Devil god and there was no hope for him...