Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  But new masks are made, and a new healer might also carve his own. This, also, is a ritual process. He begins by entering the woods and walking until he finds the right living tree. It might be better to say that the tree picks him, and it may take days.

  The time of day that tree and carver finally meet will determine the mask’s color. If it’s morning, the mask will be red; if it’s afternoon or evening, it’s black. This follows the belief that the first grand False Face made a daily journey with the Sun. He would be red in the morning as he approached from the east and black in the afternoon as he looked back into the shadows from the west.

  Basswood is customary for False Face masks, though pine, poplar, and maple are also used. One tree never used is the elm. Clearly there is tree magic among the Iroquois, and it seems even less familiar to the rest of the world than that of the Celtic druids.

  So that the power of the tree might enter into the mask, the carver will start on a live tree. The mask has to be finished to a certain point before he can remove the block that holds it. He does the features, then strikes notches above and below, chiseling out the face in a block and working it in a more sheltered place. The mask never breaks and the tree never dies, perhaps because he’s offered prayers and sacred tobacco. At almost any stage of its crafting the mask is more or less living, with sentiments and power. Once started, it can’t be left unfinished.

  Nature Strikes Back

  A white art dealer we know tells us an odd tale from the 1980s. An old Seneca from the Tonawanda Reservation broke this taboo and left a well-formed face on a live tree. We don’t know the reason. Maybe someone talked him into making the mask for money, possibly when he was drunk, and when he came to, he refused to work on it any more. Friends tried to talk to him, but he was resolved.

  Then he had a stroke. His features distorted until it was clear that he was coming to resemble the face on the tree. Our white confidant claimed to have seen pictures (before and after) confirming the marvel. Finally, the mask maker gave in, and removed and ritually destroyed the nascent artifact. His appearance went back to normal before long, but he never got his walking stride back.

  THE GOOD CROP

  It’s vitally important for these medicine masks to be renewed periodically through ceremonies and offerings of corn and tobacco. These are the rituals that would have been observed when the mask decked a living wearer, and maybe they help it to feel alive in its periods of stasis. The tobacco is often left in little pouches with the mask and needs to be changed at least once a year.

  The Sacred Corn

  The Midwinter Festival is the one at which the False Face masks are typically “fed” the sacred corn. The date of the rite is determined by the moons, a cycle probably intended to pay tribute to the matriarchy and female nature the way the old Celtic festivals did. It usually works out to be a late-January event, often held these days at Onondaga.

  Our late Tuscarora friend Norton Rickard made a specialty of raising the old-style corn. So that his friends on the Cattaraugus Reservation might have some of their own to bring to the Onondaga gathering, Norton delivered nine bushels to the shop of a friend on the lakeside rez. The shop owner was in the middle of a talk with customers when he arrived. “Just take ‘em in the back room,” she said to Norton. “People will come pick ‘em up.”

  As he dropped off the corn in the dim storeroom, he noticed twelve of the most beautiful False Faces he’d ever seen hanging on the wall in a line. Their features absolutely glowed, and their long shocks of hair trembled as if the room had its own faint breeze. He couldn’t help studying them quickly. Each was a marvel. This was a master-carver! He could have stared at them all day. The shop owner was still busy as he was on his way out, but when he could get a word in he meant to ask her where she got such beautiful creations. And how she lit them! It was an artistic display.

  He went to visit a friend and came back to the shop a few hours later. Social hour was still in force, but the owner told him that only eight of the bushels had been taken. The last should go back with him. When he went to get it he was surprised to see that the masks were gone. He knew the ceremonies involved in moving even a single mask. Doing it for twelve of them should have occupied several people for hours.

  “You guys must have been busy after I left,” he said. Nobody got the quip, and he had to explain the masks he had seen in the back room. That still didn’t clarify the situation, and one or two of the listeners looked at him like he was crazy. There had been no display of masks back there—at least no material ones.

  He called his mother, a clan mother, and asked her what was up. She just laughed. “You saw something, all right. The festival is late this year, and those masks are hungry for their corn. They showed themselves to you because you were bringing it. That must be a good crop.”

  POWER PEOPLE

  The False Face healers must have possessed all the apparently psychokinetic powers observed in the adepts of other world societies. Shamans, mystics, yogis, and Zen masters may have had nothing on them. As recently as 1940, Iroquois False Face healers were seen handling hot ashes and coals, even rubbing them without effect on living human bodies.

  In folklore, the False Faces are wizards when in trance and behind the mask. We don’t know many tales in which they came in to save the day from evil witches and sorcerers, engaging in outright duels, but it would be logical to think some of them have been told. The Faces are presumed to have the power, and it’s widely thought that, on their occasional stomp about the village, no occult evil workers will dare stick around. William Beauchamp believed that the Great Winter Feast was their usual time to march forth and purge the villages of their bad influences.

  The Faces of Green Lake

  West of Jamesville and southeast of Syracuse is the comma-shaped Green Lake, the traditional site of the Onondaga False Faces’ greatest mysteries. In historic times, an Onondaga hunter looked over the edge of a cliff and saw below him a dancing, chanting procession of Faces coming up from Green Lake. Each member of the group was laden with so many silver fish that it seemed a miracle, but he carried them like they were weightless. They were so merry with their catch that they were crowing their joy call. (“Hoh! Hoh-o-o-oh!” writes Beauchamp of it.) The hunter decided to hold his place and get a better look at these mystery men. Even behind his mound of shiny fish, the leader of the faces sensed him from a long way off and rerouted the march, in perfect stride, up the sheer face of a cliff and right into the rocky wall. The hunter heard their calls, seeming to come from within the mountain, for a long time after. They were reputed to have a meeting hall underground somewhere near there, so maybe that was the explanation.

  The False Faces may show signs of themselves in their traditional places about the state, and most of us wouldn’t know what to make of them. We hear reports now and then about apparitions of ghostly, disembodied heads in even new buildings near or on top of sites associated with the False Face healers. One of them is in a Mount Morris, New York, hotel on the site of a grove once rumored to have been a gathering spot for the False Faces. They would be ghastly ghosts, even if you knew what they were.

  TED WILLIAMS’S TALES OF THE FALSE FACES

  Ted Williams’s book Big Medicine from Six Nations is, among other things, a motherlode of supernatural folklore. It is not, however a handbook, and certainly no text. In fact, Ted often told his stories to us a bit differently than they appeared in his books.

  Ted was a member of the False Face Society, and he begins his section on the matter with the acknowledgment that the subject is taboo. He follows it quickly by giving us a good reason: Some of the masks are powerful, and thus dangerous.

  The Skull’s Warning

  In his boyhood on the Tuscarora Reservation, Ted had a young neighbor nicknamed Michael Angelo. This young fellow had a middle-sized dog that was afraid of nothing. Jeese-uh, as they called him, would attack anything he thought was menacing his young master, even a pack of larger dogs. But one night as
the two of them came home down a winding, wooded trail, this intrepid dog got whiny and terrified, slinking between his owner’s knees. Young Michael put his hands down to comfort his dog and felt its hair standing up. By himself, he went on cautiously ahead and saw the likely source of the dog’s terror: a pale, glowing skull-like face, resting on a stump by the trail, facing in his direction. His dog had felt the critter’s radiance before he had even seen it. Michael Angelo decided not to get near it and took another route home.

  The apparition of this ghostly head was taken as a warning from the False Faces for young Michael Angelo not to go the direction he was going. Before a full day was out, one of his young friends unexpectedly died. It was interpreted that this fate could have been his had he not taken the sign.

  To be the holder of a live medicine mask is an ominous responsibility. Not all the masks we see are live ones, though; some are virtual toys, made for no other purpose than to be sold. But they are not always easy to recognize. No less than Ted’s father, the famous healer Eleazar Williams, was once mistaken about a humble-looking mask.

  Feed It or Else . . .

  In Ted’s boyhood, none of the shops on the reservation sold a single item of Native American craftsmanship. The aunt of one of his neighbors decided to remedy the situation, setting up a trading post designed to prey on tourists. All went well with the northwestern totem poles and Great Plains–style eagle-feather headdresses. Things took a turn when the shop took in a medicine mask from a desperate member of one of the Six Nations. No one knew, but he had stolen it right out of the Onondaga Longhouse.

  Black and not artfully made, the mask looked like an el cheapo False Face that couldn’t possibly be alive. But if there is one thing we know about these artifacts, it is that they don’t always look like what they are.

  One after another, all the young people in the owner’s family died. Soon she lost her husband and then her own life. Then her mother was on her deathbed, where, in her last hours, she had a vision: “It’s the mask! It’s the mask that’s eating us up!”

  By then no one would touch the thing. They called in Ted’s father, Eleazar Williams, and its humble appearance fooled even him. Presuming it a dime-store tourist item, he dug a hole not far from his family’s home and buried it.

  Outside the house was a drive-in garage near a mock orange bush under which one of the family chickens used to rest in a wooden basket. Every morning before Ted’s father left for work, he came out to talk to the bird, and it clucked contentedly back as if answering him. On the morning after the mask was buried, the chicken was nowhere near its wonted basket. The False Face mask was in its place.

  Ted’s father presumed that the neighbor’s kids had seen him bury it and pulled this prank to fool him. He made a fire and burned the mask.

  The next morning the mask was back in the same basket, its black mock hair not even singed.

  A picture was forming for Eleazar Williams: Against logic and appearance, this was a live one after all. He carried the mask tenderly into the house and commenced the rituals of the tobacco. “Everything will be all right,” he told it in Tuscarora, and started the process of finding its true owners. He had no idea where to turn; the woman who had last owned it was dead.

  In the next couple of days, the Williams household observed a handful of incidents that could have been psychic and connected to the mask. As if its work with its former owners wasn’t done, a surviving nephew suffered a mysterious neck complaint. The matter came to an end on a Saturday morning when a knock fell on the Willliams family’s door. A pair of men from the Onondaga Reservation had come for their mask. “This has been missing for some time,” one of them said. “They have a way of coming home by themselves, but this one didn’t, so we decided to do medicine and find it.”

  As if they felt the trouble it was causing, the two men seemed to be in a hurry. They took the mask and went straight back to Onondaga.

  “You have to feed it,” as the Tuscarora say, “or it will eat you up.”

  The Mask Keeps an Eye Out

  During his forties—probably around the time of World War I—Eleazar Williams had lived at Six Nations in Ontario, Canada, and trained with Joo Gwadee, a great Cayuga medicine man. On a wall of this healer’s bedroom was a large, clearly live False Face mask. It was there to keep track of things, to be a watchdog.

  One night during his stay with Joo Gwadee, Eleazar Williams woke up to the sound of a sharp rattling and a tender whinny, like a puppy calling for a cuddle. He turned on the kerosene lamp and saw the mask on the wall rocking and trembling, even making the curious “False Face talk,” which till then he had never heard. Moisture like beads of sweat gathered above its lips. In terror, he ran to wake his tutor.

  The bed was empty and an unearthly glow shot through the window by it and lit the far wall as if hell were celebrating outside. When Eleazar looked out, he saw a neighbor’s house on fire, and two forms approaching in its surging light: his powerful tutor Joo Gwadee and the old neighbor he had managed to rouse and save. The mask had woken its owner in time. It had “kept track of things.”

  What Goes Around . . .

  For a long time, many bars and inns in the Northeast had a rule: “No alcohol served to Indians.” London, Ontario, held a watering hole well known as a place where Native Americans could drink, and a certain Canadian Oneida had the habit of stopping there now and again when he was in town. This Oneida man was a wandering farm worker with very little to call his own, but he did have two very small protection masks. These were mini–False Faces, virtual plaques, and he often had them on him. We wonder which powerful old relative, knowing he would need guidance, had sent him into life with these?

  After a hot day of work, this Oneida gent dropped into the aforementioned hotel during happy hour for a beer or two with fellow members of the human race. A new barmaid refused him service. “But I drink here all the time,” he said.

  “Not while I’m here,” the girl said. “Get out before I call the police.”

  Missing the fellowship as much as the beer, the Oneida departed. On the way to his quarters, he talked to the masks and told them about his troubles. It was a habit he’d had for most of his life. It always made him feel better.

  The next morning, he told his coworkers all about the experience with the new barmaid. “I bet she gives me a drink tonight,” he concluded, thinking about his report to the masks. After work, he and two friends went to the same bar. They got a shock.

  The building was a smoking pile of bricks and planks, surrounded by a crowd. “What happened?” said the owner of the mini masks.

  “Big fire last night,” someone told him. “Everybody got away safely. Everybody but the new barmaid.”

  Back at his quarters, the Oneida man tossed and turned. At last, in the deepest part of the night, he took out the small masks and talked to them like treasured friends, like godchildren who didn’t know their own power. He told them not to be so rough if he ever spoke to them that way again.

  The Senders

  A few days before Halloween 2008, a woman called my business line for help with a psychic situation centered on her son’s home in one of the towns at the edge of Erie County. Babysitting her grandchildren at the time, she was calling from the very site. She caught me while I was driving.

  It was difficult to follow her. Not only was she stressed, but a funny static on the line interfered with the conversation. I attributed it to some effect caused by my cell phone on speaker-mode, but something should have cleared at some point during the fifteen-minute drive.

  At first it seemed to me that she was doing a lot of projecting. She constructed messages, omens, and assaults out of the kitchen sink of effects common to haunted houses. But she was sincerely troubled, and I asked some more pointed questions.

  The house she was calling from was a new building on a plot of reservation land. Her son’s girlfriend had inherited the land from her Seneca grandfather. His former house still stood next door. T
he woman I talked to admitted readily that they were holding some sacred and ritual objects taken from the girl’s grandfather’s home after his death, including a couple of False Faces.

  “The rez has elders and healers. Why don’t you talk to one of them?”

  She answered without a pause. “That’s who’s causing the trouble.”

  In spite of the situation, I laughed. “What do you expect me to do about it? A white guy with a laptop? How did you get them mad at you?”

  “We’re not Native American, and they want the items back.”

  “You have to go to the elders and make your peace,” I said. “Right or wrong, that’s the way to handle this.”

  She didn’t take my advice. She turned to different sources of off-reservation help. She called people all over the western New York paranormal community, many of them friends of mine who knew nothing about the extent of her outreach. Among them was Spiritualist minister Tim Shaw. He did three phone interviews with the occupants of the house, at first thinking the matter pretty basic: garden-variety effects in an active house. Each time, though, Reverend Shaw noticed the strange static I had. It seemed that something was acting up on any phone call made from that house.