Contents
Title Page
Introduction: The Iroquois Supernatural—Reaching Beyond the Sacred
Chapter 1—The Longhouse Folk
The Iroquois
Origins
The League of Six Nations
The Longhouse
The Nations
Iroquois Languages
Iroquois Religious Influences
Into the Woods
Chapter 2—The Witches’ Craft
Iroquois Witches
Two Kinds of Witches
Spotting a Witch
Getting to the Root of the Hex
Arthur C. Parker on Witchcraft
Onondaga Witches
Mary Jemison on Witchcraft
The Heart of a Black Bird
Witch Bones
A Witch’s Bag
The Witch John Jemison
Two Seneca Witch Trials
Kauquatau
Witch Children
Chapter 3—The Witches’ Torch
Witch Lights
Anomalous Light Phenomena
The Hills of Rochester
The Lights of Oswego Bitter
Indian Hill
Train Tracks and Witch Lights
The Hill of Dead Witches
Onondaga Witch Lights
A Metaphysical Contract
Ghostly Walks and Phantom Hosts
Joe Bruchac on Witch Lights
Chapter 4—Medicine People
An Aura of the Spirit
Bear and Ted
Witch Doctors
Diviners of Mysteries
Herbs and Healings
The Seventh Son
Medicine Bags
Sabael and the Medicine Beads
For the Unborn Children
Mad Bear’s Method of Reading
Weapons of Friendship
House Clearings
Chapter 5—The False Faces
The Medicine Mask Society
The Headman of the Faces
Doctors and Doorkeepers
Beggars and Thieves
Opening the Eyes
Masks and Museums
Two Healers and the Masks
Other Masked Healers
Unmasked Healers
The Call of the Masks
The Good Crop
Power People
Ted Williams’s Tales of the False Faces
Chapter 6—Supernatural War
Directed Curses
Calling the Ancestors
The Liver Tree Curse
The Dust Devil of Boughton Hill
The Curse of the Bones
Signs of Supernatural War
Chapter 7—Power Spaces
Witches’ Walk
Hill of the Crows
Green Lake
Squakie Hill
Fort Hill and Bluff Point
The Valley of Madness
The Hill and the Stone
Kinzua
The Great Falls
Snake Hill
The Angel’s Mountain
Taughannock Falls
Lost Nation
The Dale
Lake Eldridge
High Rock Spring
The Great Hill
The Seneca National Creation Tale
Ring of Honor
Chapter 8—The Supernatural Zoo
The Celts and the Iroquois
The Fearsome Foursome
The Stone Giants
The Great Flying Heads
The Vampire Corpse
Super Serpents
The Thunderers
The Monster Bear
High Hat
The Legs
The Mischief Maker
Longnose
The Giant Mosquito
The Witch Hawk
The Servers
The Evil-Soul Gatherer
The Underground Buffalo
White Deer of the Genesee
Chapter 9—Talking Animals
Special Animals
Witch and Shape-Shifter
Changelings
Shape-Shifters
Altered Animals
Animal Clans
The Tender of the Flame
The Animals Talking
The Songs of the Dogs
Chapter 10—The Little People
The Wee Folk
Three Nations
Imparting a Ritual
Nineteenth-Century Little People
Two Nations
The Fairy Fishers
The Second Nation
Lanes of the Little People
The Djogao Skull
Fairy Trees
Chapter 11—The Land of the Elders
The Old Spirits
Five Iroquois Motifs
The Haunted Battlefield
Rogers Island
The Darkness on the Hill
The Wailing Spirits
The Ontario County Courthouse
The Kicking Chief of Cooperstown
The Five Ghosts of Red Jacket
The Tonawanda Presbyterian
Haunted Roads
Delaware Avenue
Black Nose Springs Road
The Forbidden Trail
13 Curves
West Road
Route 5
The Spirit World
I Feel My Friends Here
Bloody Mary
The Chief of the Blue Heron
The Land of the Elders
The Spirit Choirs
Footnote
Bibliography
About the Authors
About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
Books of Related Interest
Copyright & Permissions
Approximate Positions of Today’s Cities
Niagara Falls
Rochester
Syracuse
Oneida
Saratoga Springs
Canadaigua
Auburn
Buffalo
Albany
Ithaca
Jamestown
Salamanca
Elmira
Binghamton
INTRODUCTION
The Iroquois Supernatural
Reaching Beyond the Sacred
The Native Americans known collectively as the Iroquois have had an impact on world destiny out of all proportion to their numbers and territory. They have been deeply admired for their leaders as well as for their national character, their League of Six Nations, and their simple moxie, but they have had a hold on so many far-flung imaginations that isn’t easy to explain. People all over the world who have no particular interest in anything Native American have found themselves strangely haunted by these industrious, adventurous, mystical Iroquois. What could be the source of it?
The Iroquois are unmistakably and for all time native North Americans, but they might be unique even among their native New York neighbors. Something drew these five, then six nations—the Cayuga, the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Seneca, and latecomers the Tuscarora—into a single distinctive unit, this outfit we call the Confederacy, the League of Six Nations.
Enough books have been written about the character and history of the Iroquois. This book is devoted to the supernatural traditions of these first historic New Yorkers, from as far back as we can trace them, to the present day.
Figuring out what to include in this book has been tricky. Where do you draw the line between miracle and magic? Between religion and spirituality? Between the sacred and the merely spooky? This book doesn’t try to choose. How could anyone?
> All religions are at heart supernatural. Throughout history most societies have had both a mainstream supernaturalism and others that are looked upon with more suspicion. The “out” supernaturalism is often that of a less advantaged group within the major society. What the mainstream culture calls “sacred” is its supernaturalism; terms like “witchcraft” are applied to the others. Someone’s ceiling is another’s floor, and one culture’s God is another’s Devil. To someone from Mars, what could be the objective difference?
Although all Iroquois supernatural belief may seem “superstitious” or “magical” to some observers, Iroquois society itself makes its own distinctions between the sacred and the spooky. Still, one often overlaps the other.
Dhyani Ywahoo, Mad Bear, the Dalai Lama, and Michael Bastine in Dharamsala, India, in 1980
This book is not about the sacred traditions of the Iroquois. It is a profile of the supernaturalism external to the religious material recognized as truly sacred. This is a book largely about the “out” stuff: witches, curses, supernatural beings, powerful places, and ghosts. It includes things on the spiritual side: healings, power people, visions, and prophetic dreams. Some of the material is historic, archaeological, and anthropological. Much of it is as alive and current as a paranormal report.
Algonquin coauthor Michael Bastine and I have written this book from the belief that one of the world’s great spiritual traditions is that of the Iroquois, and that it’s been under the radar for too long. A broader familiarity with Iroquois traditions would help world spirituality—and hence the world.
We also believe that the world might develop more sympathy for Iroquois causes if it knew the Iroquois better.
The partnership between us is an equitable one. I did most of the book research and keyboarded the words. The voice of the narrative is mine. Michael, a highly respected elder, trained with many people mentioned in this book. Vast stretches of its words—and most of the wisdom—are his.
MASON WINFIELD
AND
MICHAEL BASTINE
1
The Longhouse Folk
You must forgive me, therefore, for not always distinctively calling the creeds of the past “superstition” and the creeds of the present day “religion.”
JOHN RUSKIN,
THE QUEEN OF THE AIR
THE IROQUOIS
In 1609 on the west bank of the lake named for him, French explorer Samuel de Champlain had the white world’s first encounter with the Iroquois—symbolically, a violent one. Two hundred Native American strangers had cheerfully attacked a much larger party of Algonquin, among whom Champlain stood. They were bold, confident, and well-formed men, Champlain reported, and he made an impression himself. At the first blast of his gun, three attackers fell dead, including two chiefs. The rest scattered at their first experience of firearms.
When Champlain asked the name of these scrappers—almost certainly Mohawks—the Algonquin called them a word that sounded like “Iroquois,” which meant something like “real snakes.” It was an indignant term, but it held respect. Another possible derivation for the word Iroquois, pointed out by archaeologist Dean Snow, is “Hilokoa,” a pidgin Basque/Algonquin name meaning, “the killer people.” Then, as now, they were admired as warriors.
The Iroquois called themselves Haudenosaunee, “People of the Long House.” They were a union of five, later six, nations who held most of New York state at the time the Europeans arrived.
The Iroquois were hunters, farmers, and warriors. They lived in small, semipermanent villages across most of what is now upstate New York. Their influence ranged far beyond. Their greatest arts were things they could carry with them: their songmaking, their storytelling, their language and their use of it. It was in the last capacity that the Six Nations folk so impressed the white world. The best of them were the greatest orators any European had ever seen.
The Iroquois were never numerous. Sir William Johnson estimated in 1763 that there might have been ten thousand of them. Two centuries later, Edmund Wilson figured that there were about double that number of mostly Iroquois people. In the 1995 New York census, 62,651 folks chose to call themselves Iroquois, which is still only about 0.3 percent of the state’s population.
Because of their political unity and prospects of empire building, the Iroquois were nicknamed “the Red Romans.” They may have been on their way to controlling a continent at the time the Europeans landed. Power brokers in all the colonial wars, the Iroquois helped shape the North America we see today. Their League of Six Nations has often been considered the model for today’s United States, and thus of democratic unions all over the world. It’s no stretch to suggest that the Iroquois were the most influential Native American political body that has ever been.
ORIGINS
The origins of the Iroquois are still debated. Until recently most historians envisioned the ancient Northeast along the model of Dark Ages Europe: a borderless, nationless land mass in which culturally distinct bodies of people—tribes—pushed each other around or ate territory whole. The Seneca scholar Arthur C. Parker (1881–1955) thought this way at the start of the twentieth century, envisioning the boundaries of Iroquois Nations—Oneida, Cayuga—moving across the map of prehistoric New York like cloud shadows along a ridge on a gusty day.
A century later, we have dramatic new tools for understanding the past, among them linguistics and genetics. We also have different ideas about the Iroquois. To understand them we need to separate for a moment the idea of culture from that of people.
Culture—language, lifestyles, artifacts, religion, customs, ways of thinking—can develop within a population. Contact with new people can change it. It can be brought in with new people who take over territory. These models—it grew here, it came here, they brought it here—are not mutually exclusive when it comes to the roots of “Iroquois-ness.”
The first Iroquoians were named after a lake—Owasco Lake near Auburn, New York—where their oldest identifiable sites were found. Currently, there are two predominant models for the origins of the Owasco culture. The more popular of them is a mix of “it grew here” and “it came here.” In this scheme, the people who became the historic Iroquois were already in place. They were the indigenous folk of the Northeast Woodlands who may have been here since the last glaciers. They may have had an Iroquoian language—that we’ll never know—but the artifacts, customs, and lifestyles that go into what we consider Iroquois-ness developed among them later, maybe as recently as a thousand years ago.
In this picture, hunting-gathering bands of eighty or so people grew into more static villages of several hundred, probably due to the practice of agriculture spreading from Mesoamerica through the Mississippian Culture of the Midwest. Owasco artifacts and lifestyles developed as innovations and through contact with other groups, and spread around upstate New York. The Iroquois nations developed as cultural identities when these villages banded together for mutual support.
There is still another picture of Owasco origins: “they came here.” Some scholars believe the relatively sudden appearance of agriculture, longhouse-style buildings, and compact villages in upstate New York means that an influx of newcomers brought them. It may have been a complete takeover. If so, it was probably Iroquoians supplanting Algonquinspeaking aboriginals. Where did these Iroquoians come from?
Archaeologists have discovered what they take to be signs of an immigration from the St. Lawrence River Valley. Linguistic historians think the push could have come from the south through the Appalachians. Iroquoian languages were spoken in the Southeast by nations like the Cherokee, from whom today’s Iroquois may have broken off before the pyramids of Egypt were built.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 1
