Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  The caste system for the Iroquois masks need not be presumed to be set in stone. We hear that the oldest and grandest of the common face masks, seasoned with generations of ceremonies, are as esteemed as the Great Doctors or Doorkeepers.

  Still, the common faces come in many untraditional forms. Seemingly answering to the changes in American society, some recently made masks have taken the form of pigs. Doubtless a new category of mask had to be made for consultants and career politicians.

  OPENING THE EYES

  But it isn’t just the healers who are the subjects of reverence. A sense of awe and respect attaches to the tools of their trade, the masks them elves, that may be hard to understand for people outside Iroquois society. This is a subject of its own.

  Orenda, the universal force of existence, gives the False Face masks a power unique among man-made objects. To many Iroquois, the greatest of these masks are alive. They occasionally wake. If you or someone you know has one of these, you better keep reading.

  For the old-timers, no classification was more significant than that between a mask that has been used in ceremonies and one that has not. The masks that have been sold to tourists over the years are most often mere works of craftsmanship, wrought like the items in shop class. They have never been consecrated by ritual use, so there ought to be little sacrilege in selling them. While some contemporary traditionalists are starting to maintain that a medicine mask of any sort is holy and sacred, they are surely far less sensitive about manufactured False Faces.

  Masks used in ceremonies are totally different. They are charged. Their “eyes have been opened.” Those that have been used in generations of ceremonies have been invested with ever more of the force of orenda. They are, in their own sense, alive.

  Traditionalists believe that these masks have to be handled with the respect and attention given to living things, even “fed” and continually revivified like biological beings. They pine for the community of ceremonies. They hunger for corn soup, itch for sunflower oil, and pant for the smoke of sacred tobacco. They can be pretty hot to hold.

  To use any mask irreverently might curse the bearer, or whoever he or she looked at while wearing it. Most Six Nations’ folk drape these False Faces when they are not in use, which minimizes the risk of riling one of them up. Masks shouldn’t be left face upward, either, since this is a sign of death. The power of the mask might take the pose too seriously and start to inflict the real thing on people and pets in the home around it.

  MASKS AND MUSEUMS

  Every Iroquois nation keeps a store of medicine masks, to which many of the ones held in white museums are returning. The Onondaga are generally considered the specialists on the handling and repatriation of the medicine masks.

  The worst imaginable environment for these masks is the one in which most twentieth-century whites encountered them: a display in a museum. To let one of these powerful objects with its own inconceivable form of life gain dust, crack, and dry in a glass pen may be as senseless and cruel as to put a lion in a cage. Do these objects live and hold consciousness in a direct sense? Do they simply project the appearance of awareness, having acquired some of the energy of the nation of their makers? These are questions that will never be answered with certainty.

  Ted Williams reminded us that many of the masks in these upstate New York museums were questionably acquired, which could not have sweetened their temperaments. Some of the Native Americans who ended up selling the masks had no business making decisions with objects of national significance. And other masks were obtained by non–Native Americans in divorces and inheritances and sold from there.

  The masks, though, at least the live ones, keep their power. Masks “caged” in museums get restless and agitated, cracking the glass in their displays and creating other problems. They act up, moving about during the night, trading places with other masks, making their distinctive, disconcerting whistle calls or causing poltergeist activity around them. Many a museum curator, they say, has been driven to an early retirement by these active masks. And they are known to play some part in their own destinies.

  The Library Fire

  In the early twentieth century, the New York State Library was housed on the fourth floor of the state capitol building in Albany. It was the fifth largest library in the United States and one of the twenty biggest in the world. It doubled as the state archives, holding a priceless collection of books, manuscripts, documents, and records going back to the days when New York was called New Netherland. It also held a trove of Native American artifacts, including some much-mistreated Iroquois medicine masks.

  At that point in time, most of those masks had to be live ones. They quite likely dated back a century or more and had been used many times in ceremonies. Some may even have been taken as the spoils of conquest. They had been mounted behind glass display cases and untouched for decades. They itched under the dust that gathered on them and were offended by the gawking visitors.

  The library had grown too big, and plans were made to move it by January 1911 to a larger facility. But there were delays in the construction of its new home, the Education Building, and the relocation was put off a few months.

  In the early hours of March 29, 1911, a fire started. By four in the morning, a full wing of the library was a howling inferno. Crowds gathered in the streets around it, yipping and dancing like children, catching the flecks of once-precious manuscripts that soared out of the building like the snowflake of hell. It’s lucky the whole structure wasn’t lost.

  Genealogists and researchers have never forgotten this event, certainly the greatest disaster that has ever befallen New York state’s library system. It’s one reason that many a passionate query into the past hits a brick wall at 1911. Lost with these records was most of a vast collection of Native American objects and artifacts. The most sacred, though, including the displays of medicine masks, were entirely untouched by the catastrophe.

  The most popular explanation for the museum fire was faulty wiring. The second was the idea that a smoldering cigar butt had been tossed into a wastebasket. But the Iroquois never doubted that the conflagration’s real source was the shameful treatment of the medicine masks in the collection. You don’t do that to a Doorkeeper, to a Great Doctor. It was as if the masks had lashed out at everything around them and left themselves standing as a message—if the white world could read it. Not a hair on one of them was even singed. Can you imagine entering the smoking wreck of the library and seeing a set of them staring at you? This building today is one of Albany’s most famous haunted sites.

  We hear through the grapevine that two Buffalo museums still have masks not on display. The same source also tells us that they have arrangements with the local Seneca concerning the fair treatment of these masks. Members of the False Face Society are invited to each museum off-hours for behind-the-scenes ceremonies. Doubtless the museum folks see this arrangement as a gesture of respect to their reservation friends. The service rendered could go both ways, and the medicine people doubtless chuckle when they think of it. Both museums are haunted, by the way, and accustomed to frequent flare-ups when new Native American displays come in or old ones are moved.

  The Will of the Masks

  Ted Williams tells us about an incident from the 1990s. Word got out that a handful of masks in the possession of one upstate museum were to be returned to the Oneida. A representative of the Onondaga Longhouse went to the museum to see if the rumor was true. He also asked to visit with the masks in question and work a ceremony for them.

  He was brought to a room in which six masks hung on a wall. He commenced a tobacco burning ceremony, and almost instantaneously the door at the back of the room flew open. No human was in sight who could have given it that kind of a shove, and the curator leaped forward to close it. The Onondaga healer, though, had gotten a look at what was behind this: Over a hundred masks not destined to be returned were being stored—“imprisoned,” Ted calls it—in this room. They wanted to be part of
the ceremony, too. He called to the curator not to bother with the door. “I’ll tell you why later.”

  When the ceremony was over, the healer told the curator a few things about False Faces. One thing the Onondaga man did not mention was that he had received a vision at the end of the ceremony. As he was leaving, he ducked his head just inside the room that held the hundred masks and said to them in Onondaga, “You’ll be coming home, too, within two years.” It was so.

  TWO HEALERS AND THE MASKS

  Among the wonders in Mad Bear’s cabin was his personal False Face. Usually it hung on a wall, its gnarled lips, nose, cheeks, and chin in plain view. White author Doug Boyd had learned great respect for Iroquois belief, but he admitted in his book on Mad Bear that it was hard to accept that this or any other mask was, in any sense, a living thing. Yet over the years of his acquaintance with Mad Bear, Boyd could swear that its “hair”—the yellow, wispy fibers hanging from it—dipped closer to the floor at every visit. Even its grin seemed to broaden.

  Many a time there were several False Faces in Mad Bear’s house, most of them on loan. Mad Bear was a culture keeper. Even people uneasy with him trusted him more than their own families to care for objects of cultural significance. It made for some turbulent nights. These masks interacted with each other like magnets. Sometimes they got restive, tossing small objects around and buzzing as if they were conversing.

  To Mad Bear, the understanding that these things were energized and even filled with human sentiments was fundamental. He cautioned his human guests to behave well around them. “Don’t treat them with any less respect than you’d give to another person I introduced you to,” he said. “Don’t laugh at them or mock them. Don’t even point at them. If you get something stirred up out of one of them, I don’t have the power to turn it around.”

  One morning, Mike Bastine came for a visit and found Mad Bear bleary-eyed. “Bear, you look awful. You been up all night?”

  “Mike, you should have heard it,” said the healer. “The masks were really acting up. I had to get up and do a ceremony to calm them down. Took forever. Boy, I wonder what was going on in the world last night. Guess we’ll find out pretty soon.” The house still smelled like tobacco and sage.

  A few years before his death, Mad Bear got sick and went off for traditional healing. He loaned two masks to Michael for safekeeping. This was a gesture of respect in both directions. “I told them where they were going,” he said to Mike. “They’ll know you. When I come back—if I come back—I’ll ask for them again, and we’ll go on a few more years.”

  Late in his life, Ted Williams admitted to me that he was a member of the False Face Society. He told me quite a bit about it. This was something that would probably never have happened in earlier centuries, but many Native American elders have started opening up to the cultures around them. It’s as if they sense a greater need in the world, as if the world has lost something it should have kept, and the time may be here for them to start bringing balance back.

  Ted had made his first mask thirty years before, just after his initiation. He didn’t know the ways then as well as he would later. Though horsehair and natural fibers are customary for masks, he figured to give the one he’d made more power by using his own long locks. He wasn’t accustomed then to the way they “think.”

  Thus he blamed himself when, shortly after, his young daughter was killed in a freak accident as she carried the mask to a show-and-tell at her school. As if drawn to her by magnetism, a car had veered into a crosswalk and virtually pursued her. The stunned driver said the car had taken on a will of its own.

  “Those things are just too powerful,” said Michael Bastine in retrospect. “You can’t take a chance on their energy going off in some direction you can’t anticipate.”

  The founder of East Aurora’s alternative Mandala School, John Newton, taught Native American children at the Onondaga Reservation in the 1980s. He liked the Onondagas’ attitude to education. He admired the society he came to know. One of his ten-year-olds said something indiscreet. “I’m a member of the False Face Society.”

  “You are?” said John. “How do you go about that?”

  “I had a dream when I was seven and I told my parents about it. They said it meant I was going to be a healer. They got me into the False Face Society. Now I lead some of the ceremonies. We did one last night.”

  “Ceremonies?”

  “Oh, yeah. We went to see a guy who was sick. Fixed him up just right.”

  “How can you lead a ceremony?”

  “We always have to have someone who leads the ceremonies.”

  “But you’re ten years old.”

  “I am,” said the boy. “But when I put on the mask, I’m a healer.”

  OTHER MASKED HEALERS

  The fabulous medicine masks—the False Faces—were not the only masked healers among the Iroquois. There were two other orders of masked medicine societies, the Husk Face Society and the Company of Mystic Animals (a group of several small societies).

  The Husk Face Society—sometimes nicknamed the Bushy Heads—is less organized and mythologized than that of the False Faces, and their masks look less like works of art. The Husk Face healers are water doctors. Their ceremonies end with a flourish of spritzing and spraying.

  The Company (or Society) of Mystic Animals is a loose group of smaller societies whose masks are inspired by animals. Their job is to teach, maintain, and perform the rites needed to keep the goodwill of the animals in the world, which looks like a spin-off of one of the main functions of the ancient shamans. They do this by reaching to the core group of medicine animals, which doubtless includes their clan animals. The spirits of the medicine animals, had taught the founders of each dance the ceremonies needed to keep them happy and to maintain the balance of the worlds—human, animal, and natural.

  Like every member of the False Faces, the conductors of these ceremonies seem to have strange powers. White guests have reported seeing the leaders of Mystic Animals rites lift red-hot stones barehanded from the lodge fire and toss them around like medicine balls. Routinely they “see” through a wooden mask that has no eyeholes and describe objects and events around the lodge. One powerful leader was reported to make a doll dance as if it were alive.

  Though they may not be as legendary as the False Faces, these Mystic Animals folk are not to be mocked. If someone is persistently irreverent during a ceremony, the leader approaches him or her with a doll—even in his blind wooden mask—and cuts the string that holds its skirt. In the dimness of the lodge, it may take time for the scoffer to notice that everyone else is laughing. His pants or her dress have fallen to the floor, doubtless from the second the doll’s drape was cut.

  Other Native North American societies have deep and powerful traditions of sacred clowns, some of them costumed and masked. Some contemporary scholars take it as given that these Iroquois maskers belong among them.

  Certainly the False Faces share some of the same features and functions. Certainly their displays are ritualized and antic. But they are more than power clowns. The awe and reverence shown the masks themselves should answer to this. Furthermore, the purpose of the medicine maskers is healing, not social commentary.

  UNMASKED HEALERS

  Not all the Iroquois healing societies use masks. The Little Water/ Animal Society and the Pigmy/Dark Dance Society were the most important of the unmasked healers. They were named after their traditional healing songs.

  The power of the Little Water Society doubtless draws from the animal clans so significant to the Iroquois. Mythologist Joseph Campbell was fascinated by their origin story, that of the good hunter killed by humans and revived through the magic and goodwill of the forest animals. There were nine Iroquois animal clans, but many more animals were involved in the ceremonies of the Little Water healers. Members of this society keep small animal parts for use as ritual objects.

  Members of the Pigmy (also Little People) Society are often called the Dark Dancer
s because of their habit of doing their songs and dances in dark or dimly lit places. Their rites and origins are connected to the Little People, to whom we devote a whole chapter.

  THE CALL OF THE MASKS

  There’s a sense of destiny to the healer, even today. A new healer is called to join the False Face Society by a dream of his own that guides him to it or something a seer recognizes in him. The work is lifelong, unless another vision tells him it’s time to leave the order.

  Sometimes the mask he uses is inherited from another healer and given away to him with a ritual. As if it were an intelligent being, the mask is told of its journey with a new owner. The mask is adopted as much as it is received. Even that may not be the right word.