Medicine man, Bathurst, N.B.

I’ve been known as Three Feathers for over 20 years. That name has been given to me by a young woman from Burnt Church years ago. My Christian name is Dennis Gedeon.

Spiritually we were born a long time ago; we just did not exist yet. One thing that has not changed and will always remain the same is our spiritualness; that spirit that lives in us never ages, it’s always there, it’s always ready to serve and to teach us. But we live in a modern world where we have separated ourselves from what we all come into the world with. We come with that knowledge; we come with that medicine first aid kit I should say and from the time we’re born we’re born to parents that already have learnt how to not listen, to not see what’s in that first aid kit that we’re born with and then they teach us how to lose it like they have and then it goes on like that.

Going into the forest is our medicine cabinet. You just don’t go in for four hours and come out and you’re a medicine man, it doesn’t work that way. Nothing happens by chance like the leaves that fall on the ground right now, we look at them as : ah gee I have to rake those leaves, but then again the leaves are there for a reason. They’re there to re-grow, they’re there to put seed, they’re there to cultivate, they’re there to make the soil rich and we rake them all away, that’s why I do not rake my leaves until the last one falls then I rake them. I let them nurture the soil which we get, everything we need we get from the Earth.

Spruce gum, I love spruce gum. It’s crystallized right now, but if you were to take a piece and put it in your mouth and chew, it would still turn it into regular gum. Sometimes I allow people to have a sample of this, it’s good for the stomach, it’s good for the blood flow, the juices go in and it goes in through with your saliva you know, in your mouth and when you first give it to somebody they say wow, they can’t believe it’s gonna turn into a regular piece of gum that you see at the store, but as they chew, the first five minutes it’s horrible but it gets better after a while and then you start feeling good. What’s really good to help the immune system when you have blood problems and things like bowels, is red spruce tea. It’s a bark, all you need is about like this and it’s just regular bark, but you have to watch, you have to know where to get it, you have to make sure the tree is healthy enough. What we do is we take some of the bark and we peel it back and we look at the sap, it depends on the color of the sap that will tell us if it’s red spruce bark it’s good for tea for healing, otherwise you have too many pollutions in your medicines you’re going to be drinking those pollutions and that is not good. You have to spend a lot of time into the forest, you have to, you have to let everything about the forest to become part of your, what I call inter space flow, universal flow and then you have to feel the spirits of the animal. You have to feel, it’s not a knowledge they have, it’s an energy and that energy is a language onto our language that have no words. Like you can feel, like I go in the forest and I feel the bear and if I’m, if I need medicines I can feel the energy and as you see the bear, you can see him picking the medicines, how they, you know it’s amazing how they look after it how they, ah it’s just fantastic.

Everything is here to help us from the birds, the trees, the grass that we sit on, but if we’re going to keep saying what’s the difference and just eating what we want, do what we want and having fun the way we want, then I guess we won’t see much of 70-75 or we’re lucky at 80 if we’re really lucky you know. I like to live a good life, I like to do the best I can with what I have and that’s my gratefulness, like I should say will all we’ll all end back to Mother Earth you know, to all my relatives you know, they’re watching. Your relatives are watching, my relatives are watching and every now and then we get touched at night and we say oh it’s a ghost! No it’s our grandfathers and grandmothers smacking us on the back of the head and telling us to wake up a little bit, it’s never too late to make a difference in our own lives and that’s what it’s all about really, you know.