Tracking Doctor Lonecloud: Showman to Legend Keeper (review)

Dr Jerry Lonecloud (1854-1930) - also known as Haselmah Laski, Germain Bartlett Alexis, Jerry Luxcey, and Jeremiah Bartlett - lived an extraordinary life, which is detailed in Tracking Doctor Lonecloud: Showman to Legend Keeper. The volume includes an introduction by Ruth Holmes Whitehead and Lonecloud's 'memoirs,' a collection of reminiscences, legends, and ruminations on the natural world transcribed from notes that the Halifax writer and journalist Clare Dennis took while interviewing Lonecloud in the 1920s. In the introduction Whitehead recounts the major details of his life in about twenty pages. She has pieced together a reasonably full account of the life of this rather illusive subject through careful research. The details are enhanced by perceptive comments on the extent to which Lonecloud, by virtue of his career as a showman, learned to present himself as 'a kind of icon or caricature of Indian-ness' (28), while retaining ties to the Mi'kmaq community and traditions. In lieu of a full biography of Doctor Lonecloud, which he certainly merits, Whitehead presents a competent and efficient sketch of his life. The volume is beautifully presented, including more than three dozen well-chosen photographs and illustrations, and sidebar descriptions of Mi'kmaq words and additional information about people, places, and events mentioned in the memoirs.

Lonecloud was born in Belfast, ME, of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq parents, who travelled extensively, hunting and gathering herbs that they converted into tonics and medicines for sale. Both his parents were 'medicine people,' and his father was associated with the Morse's Indian Root Pills Company of Boston. A formative event in Lonecloud's life came in 1865 when his father, a Civil War veteran who was a member of the posse that tracked and captured John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, failed to return from a trip to New York. It was later presumed that he was murdered for the reward money he received for his part in Booth's capture. Less than a year later, Lonecloud's mother died, and he led his three younger siblings back to Nova Scotia, where Lonecloud spent his time labouring, hunting, trapping, and guiding sportsmen. In the early 1880s he was recruited to join Healey and Bigelow's Wild West Show, where he lectured, made medicines and tonics, and acted in the shows. He later formed the Kiowa Indian Company to put on shows and sell medicine and, after that petered out, joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He returned to the Maritimes in the mid-1880s and married Elizabeth Paul, a young Maliseet woman who played Pocahontas to Lonecloud's John Smith in a short-lived revival of his medicine show in New Brunswick. Eventually, Lonecloud and his wife made their way back to Nova Scotia, where they had seven children (two of whom died in the Halifax Explosion) and made their living selling medicine, guiding, and making baskets, moccasins, and other handicrafts. Lonecloud eventually became chief medicine man for the Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq, an important ceremonial position, and used his office and considerable practical education to lobby the federal Department of Indian Affairs for fair treatment for the Mi'kmaq of Halifax County.

Medicine man, showman, entrepreneur, community leader - Dr Lonecloud's life history shatters myths about the degeneration of Native culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his capacity as a medicine man, Lonecloud demonstrates that traditional knowledge of the natural world, cosmology, and ceremonial life retained vital importance to the Mi'kmaq. Moreover, his authority as chief medicine man for all of Nova Scotia shows that, in the face of concerted efforts by the Department of Indian Affairs to impose a municipal structure of government on the Mi'kmaq, the traditional political culture endured. Dr Lonecloud's memoirs are an entertaining read and provide a rare and important glimpse into the Mi'kmaq world of this period.