Concerning Iconology and the Masking Complex in Eastern North America

IROQUOIAN LINGUISTIC STOCK

NORTHERN DIVISION

Iroquois

Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca (Ontario and New York State)
An outstanding feature in the religious life of the Iroquois from the period of first contact with Europeans down to the present day is found in the masking complex. The seventeenth century Jesuit records of the Hurons and the Five Nations of the Iroquois proper abound with descriptions of the vehement behavior of masked shamans responding to the impulses of dreams: “Horrible demons” represented by wooden masks, worn on rampages designed to drive away evil in the native settlements, were found from one end of the Iroquois territory to the other. The accounts of these missionaries preserve a wealth of information, some of it diverse in character and not always easy to harmonize throughout, but on the whole capable of generalization to a degree sufficient to be abstracted for the purpose of this survey study. Among the modern Iroquois who have not blandly succumbed to the teachings of Christian missionaries – and they number some thousands – the use of masks is one of the outstanding practices in ritual and ceremony. Systematic ethnological study of the masking complex of the three tribal divisions of the Iroquois who have followed without a lapse the “faith of the fathers” has added much to the sum total of knowledge of masking beliefs and rites among the Iroquois in Canada and the United States. Compilations from the early Jesuit and recent sources (Morgan, Converse, Orr, Beauchamp, Parker, Fenton, Speck) enable the ensuing condensed resume to be made. The arrangement in Dr. Wm. N. Fenton’s exceptionally well-organized report, Masked Medicine Societies of the Iroquois (1941), is herein followed. It is a pleasure to express the satisfaction felt in having the task of generalizing so agreeably lightened by Fenton’s article, which treats the salient features of Iroquois masking. His study summarizes the masking data from all the available published material on the subject down to the time of writing.2

Masks, like all ceremonial properties, are esteemed in Iroquois belief as “medicine” to be used with other agencies such as drugs (herbs, etc.) for benefit to health and welfare when spiritually treated in accordance with ritual requirements. On the other hand, they are “poison,” in the vernacular of the Indians, when neglected or mistreated in a manner to stir the resentment of the forces they represent. This is a point of real importance in respect to mask rites among the Iroquois and some of the Delawares.

Recognizing that there exist two distinct masking societies among the Iroquois people of the Long House faith indoctrinated by the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, we encounter the rites and properties of the False Face Medicine Society for one and those of the Husk Face Society for the other.

Fenton generalizes on the essential features of the False Face Society as follows. Of the two classes of beings represented, the first is that of the leader, “The Great One,” who lived on the rim of the earth, as a myth relates, and traverses the path of the sun. He carries a great staff and huge turtle-shell (snapping turtle) rattle. His face is red in the morning as he comes from the east, and black in the afternoon as he looks back from the direction of the setting sun. He controls high winds and watches over pestilence which might destroy the people. Masks representing him are painted red or black, have long hair, and are shown with crooked (broken) nose and mouth portraying the pain he suffered when the mountain struck his face when he was defeated by the good spirit in the contest which, mythology relates, took place in a contention between them as to who should rule the world. A few have high-bridged noses, and all have protruding lips, twisted, straight, hanging or flaring like spoons for blowing ashes on patients receiving treatment by the society in its curative ritual. Small bags of native tobacco are tied to them as offerings.

The second class is that of the Common Faces who live everywhere in the forests. They are deformed, whence the Seneca vernacular name hadui, “hunch-back.” Some of them carry folded hickory bark rattles, some turtle rattles, others only a stick. They crave mush or tobacco, for which they beg the people, and they also cure by blowing hot ashes on sufferers. The masks of this class are ill-defined and of great variety. To these masks, too, small bags of tobacco are attached as offerings. (Fenton, 194l, 420.)

Fenton’s version of the False Face Society origin myth (Seneca of the Allegany band) is briefly as follows, taken from the epic of creation.

THE STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL OF THE EARTH

Our Maker finished this earth and banished evil spirits. Going westward he met the head of the False Faces. They argued about whose earth it was and agreed to settle the title by contest. Decided to test power by summoning a distant mountain to come to them. They sat down facing the east. The great False Face shook his turtle rattle and caused the mountain to move part way. The creator summoned it to come and it came directly up to them. When his rival suddenly looked around it struck his face, breaking his nose bridge and the pain distorted his mouth. The creator assigned him the task of driving disease from the earth, aiding travelers and hunters. “The loser agreed that if humans make portrait images of him, call him grandfather, make tobacco offerings and set down a kettle of mush, that they too shall have the power to cure disease by blowing hot ashes.” The creator placed him in the rocky hills to the west near the rim of the earth, and he agreed to come when the people summon him.

The source legend for the Common Faces as Fenton records it is given in the next abstract.

THE GOOD HUNTER’S ADVENTURE

Later as humans went about on earth hunting they carried native tobacco and mush. They were tormented by shy beings with long hair who flitted timidly behind trees. Sometimes a hunter found the ashes of his fire strewn about. It was discovered that a False Face came and scattered the coals as if seeking something. That night the hunter had a dream in which the False Face requested tobacco and mush. The hunter supplied the request, and the Faces came and taught him their songs and method of treating the sick with hot ashes. In a dream they asked him to remember them each year with a feast, telling him they were everywhere in the forests bringing good luck to those who remember them.

Another informant told Fenton a tale somewhat different from the foregoing, in which the False Faces, in return for a favor, showed a hunter how to cure by blowing hot ashes and presented him with a miniature mask as a model for making the larger ones. Later these hunters showed their people how to make masks and they organized a medicine society. (Fenton, op. cit., 419.) There are also other versions of the myths of origin recited by informants in other tribes of the Iroquois, but these are typical.

Here is Fenton’s summary of the function of the False Faces.

The Faces of the forest also claimed the power to control sickness. They instructed the dreamers to carve likenesses in the form of masks, saying that whenever anyone makes ready the feast, invokes their help while burning Indian tobacco, and sings the curing songs, supernatural power to cure disease will be conferred on human beings who wear the masks. The dancers should carry turtle shell rattles and speak a weird, unintelligible language. They can scoop up glowing embers in their bare hands without suffering burns when they blow hot ashes on the sick person. (Fenton, 1941, 406.)

Fenton sees reason, after conning the early Huron records, to assume that the Iroquoian customs sprang from their own or Huron culture, whence it spread to the Iroquois proper after 1648, “where it became so thoroughly imbedded that, despite 300 years of buffeting by white contact, the masks have maintained standards prescribed in the origin legends. Masks have become increasingly ornate and grotesque since contact but only in the class of ‘beggar masks’ which is the most plastic.”

As for the masks of the second major classification, namely the corn-husk masks, Fenton has the following to say:

The Husk Faces are a race of agriculturists. They dwell on the other side of the earth where they till their fields amid high stumps. Coming from the east every new year they visit the Seneca Longhouse during two nights of the Midwinter Festival. Preceded by runners they arrive amid great din of beating the building with staves, stop the dances and kidnap a chief for interpreter. As messengers of the three sisters – corn, beans and squash – our life supporters, they have great powers of prophesy. The interpreter relates the message of the old woman, their leader, that they are hurrying westward to hoe their crops! They then give some incidents of their home life and request the privilege of dancing with the Indians, which all augurs for a season of fertility. The Husk Face Society company may be made up of men, but some dress as women and participate in the dances as if they were women. They have power to cure by blowing hot ashes. They also signal the approach of the wooden False Faces.³

Fenton’s version of the legend of their origin among the Iroquois is here given in abstract.

A hunter who had killed a deer perceived a male Husk Face near him. He asked where he came from and where he was going. The Face answered that he was bringing corn for him from where the Master of Life had planted it for all the people. Then after more discourse concerning his mission the Husk Face instructed the hunter to tell his people to prepare a likeness of his body, with a corn-husk mask which would enable him to aid them. He agreed to bring mankind the seeds of corn, beans and squash for them to plant. He concluded by instructing the man to carry home with him all that he had given him.⁴

The masks of the Iroquois have been objectively classified by Fenton, whom I follow, as of twelve types, based on specimens which he examined in museum collections wherever they are known. The crooked-mouth mask has one corner of the mouth pulled up or down; the crooked nose turned the same way represents the distortion of the defeated spirit referred to in the myth just given. The mask with straight lips has them distended like a duck bill across the whole face. The spoon-lipped mask has flared or puckered lips in the position of blowing, as is done in curing by blowing hot ashes on the patient. The hanging-mouth mask has the corners of the mouth turned down, like the “muse of tragedy.” The last three types often have a crest of spines on the forehead, for which Fenton did not get a clear explanatory symbolism, but which the Cayuga assert represent the spines on the upper side of the snapping turtle’s tail.⁵ Masks with a protruding tongue Fenton considers an Onondaga type. The wry-faced type, or smiling masks are frequently beggar masks, though also used in curing rites. The masks with wrinkled and puckered mouth generally belong to the class of beggar masks. The “divided” mask represents a spirit whose body is riven in twain, the division being usually in the right half of the face painted red, the other half black. Fenton quotes Hewitt as saying that it portrays a being half human and half supernatural. The Seneca are unfamiliar with this form, and Fenton thinks it a Cayuga-Onondaga spirit localized among the Canadian Six Nations at Grand River. He also suggests that it may possibly have been taken over from the Delawares who settled among the Cayuga. The latter, I was told by Lower Cayuga Long House informants who called it a thunder-mask, is exposed in the face of an oncoming gale or a tornado to split its force. They also say the two colors denote that the mask spirit is in the middle of the sky between east and west.⁶ Long-nosed types are not taken as serious symbols but are intended to represent the trickster of folk tales (as Fenton thinks) and to frighten children. The horned masks, so-called buffalo masks, are a relatively recent development among the Seneca, introduced about 1900, Fenton was told. Note that Fenton further says: “Some of the horned masks have a decided diabolical or negroid appearance and were probably intended as caricatures of white gods or the other new races that came to live near the Senecas at Buffalo.”⁷

Unusual face types appear from time to time when False Face spirits reveal themselves to hunters and woodcutters in the forest. They are then carved in the likeness of the apparition.

The corn-husk masks are constructed in two techniques, one by a circuit of husk braids sewed together as are corn-husk mats, the other constructed by a twined process much less usual now than formerly. The visage is framed by a fringe of shucks around the entire face. No corn-husk mask has yet been observed with horse-tail or other fur representation of hair. Small bags of cloth or of corn-husk itself containing an offering of native tobacco are attached to the foreheads just as on the wooden masks. Among the Canadian Cayuga, miniature corn-husk masks are attached to the large ones when a dream impulse or a fleeting vision of a husk-face spirit has been experienced by the maker.

Animal masks are not common among the Iroquois. One, however, delineates the features of a pig and is used quite secretively in a most serious curing ritual by a medicine man and his colleagues among the Canadian Cayuga. Among the Seneca, it is only of the beggar type. Most likely it is derived from masks formerly representing the bear.⁸ Fenton refers to a few known examples of “blind” masks, those having no eye-holes, but he could not secure information on their function.

Miniature False Faces, close replicas of the large ones, are found among Iroquois Long House creed adherents. They represent the same spirits as the large masks, and serve as guardians of health (Seneca) when hung in the home in an inconspicuous place, and as “medicine” given by a doctor at the end of a ceremony in which he has guessed the cause of a sufferer’s ailment (Cayuga). Other functions besides these have been attributed to the maskettes by Fenton. When attached, for instance, to the forehead of a large mask the Seneca say a miniature may represent the child of the large one and usually has the same color and features.

In treating the masking phenomena of the Iroquois I have withheld mention, for the purpose of emphasis, of the outstanding fact that no accounts of early or late Iroquois life testify to the existence of stationary face images or icons in the Long House or in other religious functionings. This fact will be made the focal point of a conclusive supposition concerning mutuality in the religious history of the Iroquois and the Delawares (see paragraph VIII of Summary and Conclusions).

It develops that the knowledge we possess concerning Iroquois masking is most satisfactory from the point of view of use and belief. It has a distinctive and definite quality among the magico-religious practices of a people who have injected native logic and system into almost everything they do.

Seneca of Oklahoma
From several ethnological sources the impression seems to prevail that the Seneca located in Oklahoma, subsequent to their removal from Kansas in the first quarter of the last century, have been responsible for a certain degree of interculturation among the Delaware and Shawnee as far as masking rites are concerned. This testimony comes from Dr. Erminie W. Voegelin’s Shawnee informants and from my Oklahoma Delaware sources.

The Seneca shuck-faces, as stated to Voegelin, met at the council house and tried to shake hands with visitors, having a little cow manure paste smeared on their hands.

As for the False Faces of this group, there was a company of twelve, some red, some black all over, with silver disks for eyes, and dressed in bearskin or in a buffalo-skin blanket. A pinch of medicine tied in a cloth was tied on the forehead of the mask. It enabled them “to see everything.” They also carried turtle-shell rattles. When practicing their curing function they entered the house crawling, and picked up fire, holding the coals in their bare hands and putting their hands on the bare flesh of the patient. Voegelin notes further that one of the masks worn by the leader was painted half black, half red. She also learned that the masks used by the Shawnee in Oklahoma were borrowed from the neighboring Seneca Nation. The wearers of the False Faces acquired power to cure the sick only through the mask, not through their own powers. The same general facts are furnished by the Oklahoma Delawares, with the statement that the masking practices had been observed by them among the Seneca. In short, it seems that a fusion of masking practices had been going on after the removal of the Delaware, Shawnee and some other migrant tribes to an extent that makes it most difficult to assign precise limitations as to tribe without specialized and carefully organized questioning of traditionalists. Evidently, however, the Seneca Iroquois in the Oklahoma area were responsible for much of its diffusion among their associates of Algonkian identity, after the commingling of these bands on the Quapaw reservation in eastern Oklahoma.

The source material from this western zone may accordingly be re- garded as peripheral so far as the East is concerned and derived from the pre-migration period. Its contribution to the problems confronting us is therefore not easy to define.

Through the vicissitudes of strife, defeat and expatriation which the Huron Nation has suffered in the last three centuries, nothing of the former elaborate Huron masking complex seems to have survived, even in tradition, among the descendants in Oklahoma, so far as published records reveal, or among the Catholic converts of the Huron Nation at Loretta, Province of Quebec. (For references to documentary sources on the use of masks among the early Huron, see Kinietz, 1940, 78, 138.)

SOUTHERN DIVISION

Tuscarora (North Carolina)

Relating to the Tuscarora in the turbulent times before the extirpation of this Iroquoian tribe from its seats on the Neuse river, North Carolina, Mr. A. F. C. Wallace has pointed out to me the description of icons given in von Graffenried’s journal of 1711. (Todd, 1920, pp. 277-8.)

At New Bern where I settled and started the little city, I observed another custom among the Indians who lived before, which was somewhat nearer the Christian worship. There they had constructed a sort of altar, very cleverly and artistically, out of woven twigs and having an arched dome. In one place there was an opening as though made for a little door, through which they laid the offering inside. In the middle of this heathen chapel were little holes in which they hung corals and also offered wampum. Towards sunrise there was set up a wooden image tolerably well carved, the figure as herewith sketched, half red, half white, before which was stuck up a long stall upon which was a crown. The staff had rings around it, red and white. Toward the north or rather towards the west, there was placed opposite to it another image with an ugly face, colored black and red. They represented thus by the first image a good divinity, and by the other the devil, with whom they are better acquainted.

The red and white and red and black coloring of these stationary icons is of significance in this area since it is symbolic of the dual deistic forces of Iroquois belief and brings to mind a question bearing upon the dual color symbolism to be observed in icons of the Delawares and the Munsee-Mahican in the North. Ancient Tuscarora symbolism provides another instance of variation in icon pattern. The images and their deistic symbolism seem to be entirely beyond the pale of memory of the historic Tuscarora according to A. F. C. Wallace.

Cherokee (North Carolina)

In only one of the more than twenty dances known in the past and present series of the Eastern Cherokee of North Carolina do masks come into play. There are no indications in the records of other forms or uses of human images among the Cherokee, nor is there published matter on the Oklahoma Cherokee to check with the data on masks coming from the Eastern or Qualla Band and summarized here from a manuscript study in press.⁹

The dance referred to is known as the Booger Dance, so termed in reservation English because it represents the actions of bogey-men or “ghosts” who make their appearance in the course of the dance, impersonating the early whites and others who first invaded the Cherokee country. These impersonators wear face masks in the characteristic manner of masked clowns. A description of the Booger or Mask Dance follows, as abstracted from the monograph mentioned above.

In the program of all-night dancing, the Bear Dance is prominent and popular among the conservatives of the band living in the Big Cove district of the Qualia reservation. Its movement is a contra-clockwise circling around the room of a dwelling of one who is host for the festive occasion. The occasion is winter-time, and the Bear Dance takes place early in the evening. The musical accompaniment is furnished by one male singer shaking a gourd rattle to mark time and another man sitting next him using the wooden water-drum. In the course of the Bear Dance, when it is well under way, a commotion outside the door announces the coming of strangers. Then a party of from five to ten masked figures breaks into the room, filled to its utmost with its dark spectators, and stops at one side without saying anything. The Bear Dance and dance song cease abruptly at the intrusion. The intruders all wear masks of wood (today cut out of pasteboard or a carton for its lightness and greater comfort) and are draped from the head downward in bed quilts or old ragged coats. Their garb is intended to represent the slovenly and nondescript appearance of unkempt Whites and Negroes, or perchance a strange Indian. The master-of-ceremonies or host, who is usually the singer, addresses the strangers, asking who they are, whence they come, what they want and who their leader is. The conversation is thenceforth carried on in whispers between him and the leader of the maskers. The intruders “do not speak Cherokee,” so the host pretends to interpret their responses. They are told to be seated on a bench at one end of the room and awkwardly do so. The host now discovers by questioning that the strangers come from the “East,” that they want first to fight, which proposal is refused; next that they want women, likewise refused; and finally that they want to dance. To this request the host agrees and the strangers are told to join in the Bear Dance, which is immediately resumed by the house-party. The host next asks the strangers to give their names, which they do one by one. These names are invariably obscene, causing consternation among the audience when announced. The masked strangers then join the dance-circle movement, not dancing properly but jumping and cavorting around like rowdies (awkwardly “outlandish” white imitation of Indian dancing). They seize women partners, jostle them, “feel them up” and even charge toward the excited audience of women and girls with violent and offensive gestures – but saying nothing. Then suddenly at the conclusion of the Bear Dance song the maskers bolt out of the door into the darkness and leave for good. The evening dances are thereupon decorously resumed and the masked Boogers are apparently forgotten.

The significance of this Rabelaisian stunt in the Cherokee dance cycle may now be considered. The Boogers impersonate the lowest moral characters accompanying the European invasions. Under speculation as to their national identity, they may be thought to represent the first transient contact with the Spanish expeditions of Pardo and De Soto among the Cherokee of the mid-sixteenth century. They furthermore represent to the Cherokee people the baleful carriers of contagious diseases not previously known to the Indians. In short the Boogers represent and symbolize those consummate evils of European contact and the dreary fate of the natives when their Edenic realm of an unspoiled aboriginal age was shattered-in short all the misfortune that history has shown to have since befallen the Cherokee people. Oh shades of primitivism! What folk the world over have failed to imagine that the past was Utopian in comparison with the “degeneracy of the present age”?

Cherokee masks merit the following descriptions. They are arranged according to categories of use. Of the score or more Cherokee wooden masks observed in use in the Booger Dances witnessed by the writer and seen in the hands of the Indians, all are made of buckeye (Aesculus glabra). They are generally colored dark red from pigment of red earth of the soil anywhere on the mountain sides of the reservation, a red stain made by boiling sumach berries, or with black stain boiled down from black walnut bark and poke-weed berries. Some of the visages are wood in natural color. Otherwise there is no color symbolism in the Cherokee masks. Three racial types are noted: those representing Europeans, with black smears or tufts of fur to show thick eyebrows, mustaches, head-hair and chin-beards, or with tufts of brown or whitish animal hair (opossum, rabbit, groundhog, bear, fox, or other obtainable fur) tacked on the forehead. A few are representations of Negroes, blackened and with similar hair patches-carved, however, without any effort to reproduce the Negro physiognomy. The Negro images represent slaves or servants associated with the European invasion. In none is horse tail used to represent long streaming hair – a characteristic of Iroquois and Delaware images. The “crooked-nose and mouth” and big-lipped blowing mask types of the Iroquois are absent. Prominent teeth are, however, seen in some. Nor are metal eye-plates observed. Tie-strings to fasten the masks on the heads are of commercial cord or of native-made twisted milkweed strings. No two masks have been seen which are strictly identical in features or hair arrangement. The third racial type is that of the Indian. When such are used in the Booger Dance they represent strange Indians from afar travelling in company with the whites. All Cherokee Booger masks are grotesque and exaggerated in their constructive features to emphasize the unkempt, “uncouth,” and especially the “diseased” facial architecture of the disreputable white man, as the Indian judges his appearance. Occasionally animal faces – bear, buffalo, deer – appear in the Booger Dance to vary the scene. There is no formal limitation to the forms or types of these likenesses. Anything ludicrous is admissible in the disguise of the Boogers. A horse or mule skull carried by a Booger dancer has been seen, a hornet or paper wasp’s nest (Vespa maculate) has occasionally been worn, its interior cleaned out and open at the back, and holes cut in front for eyes and mouth. Its corrugated, frayed gray surface typified the corrosive effects of loathsome disease introduced by strangers from overseas. The wooden masks are now thought by the Indians to be too painful, chafing and heavy to wear. Lately they have learned to substitute this material with pasteboard cut-out face coverings, with fur patches and noses sewed on them.

Cherokee masking is also associated with animal propitiation before and after hunting, by the wearing in former times of animal masks carved to resemble the black bear, the buffalo, the buck, doe and “spike” deer. One type of skin mask, made of untanned groundhog hide with or without the fur and representing the visage of the wildcat, was also employed as a decoy by the hunter in killing wild turkeys. The function of the latter series of face masks is that of placation of game animals by single hunters before and after the hunt, and, we are told, as decoy devices.

Another mask type is that of the medicine-man which tradition asserts was used by the native doctor in his ministrations for the exorcism of disease. This is also a wooden mask with Indian features, but it has the distinction of having a coiled rattlesnake realistically carved on the forehead.*

The animal masks and the medicine-man’s masks lie in quite a different category from that of the Booger masks. They served a magico-religious purpose in former times before the introduction of firearms, over a century and a half ago, changed the economy and religious behavior of the Cherokee from within and without.

Reverting to the Booger masks, one may observe some significant traits. Firstly, the Booger masks embody no formal religious symbolism in Cherokee cultural life of historic times. Their function is outwardly secular and dramatic. If, before the era of European contact, any religious symbolism in connection with the expulsion of disease existed in the performance of the masked Boogers, it seems to have been forgotten or overshadowed in competition with the dramatic appeal exerted by such a spectacle upon the sensitivities of a people fully aware of the tragic destiny ahead of them when the European cultural tide reached their borders. Notwithstanding these circumstances of the detrimental factor of the White influence, we cannot ignore the fact that the Booger episode in the dance cycle of the people has an implicitly purposeful significance as a medium of magical influence to weaken the power of evil by propitiatory gestures and mimicry of its authors. We know of the aphorism found among peoples of most ages and times which nullifies or at least reduces the degree of evil power on earth by according it the flattery of attention by prayer, sacrifice or dramatization. I am convinced that, in early as well as in contemporary Cherokee thought, where any retrospection is given to the matter by the Indians, the feeling exists among them that the spiritual agencies of misfortune, and especially those of disease, are in a measure “bought off” through the acting out of their characters by the Boogers who impersonate the ghostly progeny of the original beings “from the east” who brought these curses to the natives. Herein lies a latent and ancient spiritual motivation for the Booger performance that gives it meaning as a form of prophylaxis to prevent if not cure the evils for which the Cherokee hold the whites responsible. Granting that these ideas be reasonable inferences in an etiological view of the Booger Dance performance, I would venture to propose another disclosure of considerable importance in the ethno-history of the Iroquoian speakers of both the northern cultural horizon (the Iroquois proper of New York and Ontario) and those of the Southeast (the Cherokee). It is this: An old common property of the Iroquoian group before its separation into the northern and southern divisions was for mask dance rituals to function as a means of prevention, reduction and/or curing of physical misfortune, primarily of disease. Whether from the viewpoint of psychology they be defined as a spiritual means of sterilizing evil potencies, as antiseptic rites or neutralization mediums in Cherokee native thought, depends upon how we interpret Cherokee attitudes toward the problems of remedying afflictions. Further, that where the northern Iroquois have retained and developed the curative function of the masking complex, the Cherokee have preserved little more than vestiges of the original purpose and have developed its dramatic elements in the spectacle of the Booger Dance. I may add that I have not been led to this inference by convictions of a purely deductive nature. It has long been a question in the minds of students of the eastern cultures as to where the indications of cultural parentage common to both divisions would manifest themselves in the process of analytic investigation which has lately challenged attention among devotees to Iroquoian research. Where, one asks himself, may one expect to find the bonds, other than linguistic, that link the northern and southern members of the Iroquoian stock? Here may be one cognate trait of common property despite the wide differences in the masking complex as a whole which distinguish the two areas. A rift in the veil of obscurity that shrouds the early history of culture relationships of the eastern tribes should sooner or later open up to shed more light on our question of early elements common to both Iroquoian divisions.

A concluding remark seems called for in connection with the fore- going discussion of the Booger Dance and its significance in Cherokee public demonstrations. If an enduring, almost ineradicable, trauma memory of terrorism inspired by the menace of the coming of the white man be thought too drastic an explanation for the place of the Booger Dance in the sixteenth century historical picture of ceremonies and their modern survivals, we need only to remind ourselves that almost two centuries later Cherokee children “ran screaming from the face of the white man,” as a well-known historian puts it. Folk religious cere- monies of an early age of tribal life can become reduced to folk festivals more or less devoid of spiritual symbolism in subsequent times, with a tantalizing perplexity as to the psychological circumstances bringing about the change in their cultural value.¹⁰

As the material presents itself to my mind, we see in the Booger Dance performance a desperate effort on the part of the Cherokee people in a state of apprehension over the consequences of alien white intrusion within their frontiers of culture, to sterilize the effects of contagion from disease and national demoralization by mimicry of the dreaded demons. And the basic motive, as implicitly reflected in the pattern of the performance, is illustrated in masking rituals of the False Face Society of doctors who cure and prevent disease among the northern Iroquois.

To recapitulate somewhat further, the essential point to bear in mind in considering the matter of stock relationships as just outlined is that the Cherokee, in contradistinction to the Iroquois, do not accord religious attention to the Booger masks. No taboos of treatment, no tobacco offerings, no consecrated addresses or prayers, or transformation of character among the wearers are involved in them. Especially worthy of note is the fact that the wearing of the Booger masks is not believed to invest men with spiritual power to cure or with magical power to handle coals, fire, or ashes with impunity, or to acquire penetrating magic vision, and that the mask company constitutes no eclectic society of shamans. The striking thing about the Booger masks is that they operate secularly only, their chief purpose being to demonstrate and display profanely the events of national history.

Turning from consideration of masking in the Cherokee Booger Dance to another southeastern group almost adjacent to the Cherokee, namely the Catawba and Waxhaw of the Siouan linguistic stock, inhabitants of the Catawba and Congaree rivers, Speck has noted the following.

There is furthermore a vague memory of a dance in which sections of a gourd shell covered the laces of some of the dancers, but recollections in Sally Brown’s mind are too murky to quote. That a masked dance was part of the Southeastern Siouan rituals is proved by Lawson’s narrative of what he witnessed when stopping at a Waxhaw village on the Congaree. The Waxhaw were a subdivision of the Catawba. Sam Blue brought out statements that he recalled hearing of lace masks worn by a dance leader, made of muskrat hide with the hair removed, painted red around the eyes. . .. No further particulars are remembered.¹¹

ALGONKIAN LINGUISTIC STOCK

Delawares

We now come to consider the Delawares, one of the most important masking groups of the East. About the middle of the eighteenth century they began to migrate from their home territory in what is now southern and eastern New York, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware. The largest body of the Delawares moved westward across Pennsylvania to Ohio, attended by Moravian missionaries who had converted numbers of them to Christianity. By the first part of the nineteenth century, they had settled in Indiana, by its second half had crossed the Mississippi to Kansas, and finally cast in their lot with the Cherokee of Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. These expatriates are known as the Delawares of Oklahoma. Other local bands of the original Delaware Nation turned to the Iroquois of the upper Susquehanna and cast in their fate as adopted members of the Six Nations. A small group persists in southern Ontario bearing the name Delawares of the Six Nations. Two additional segments of the loose confederation they had formed in the home territory also reached Ontario and survive under the names of Munsee of the Thames, and Moravians of Moraviantown. From these groups we possess accounts of varied ethnographic value giving information on masking beliefs and rituals.

After this introduction, condensed summaries of the published information are presented under the section headings to follow. It is unfortunate that the confusion on linguistic and ethnic identity existing in historical documents treating with various bands or reservation units of the so-called Delawares has not been cleared up by a competent ethnohistorian. To everyone, even the Algonkian specialist, the undefined situation is a stumbling block to cultural study.

Delawares of Oklahoma
The chief sources of reference for masking among the Oklahoma Delawares are Harrington¹² and Speck¹³, who utilize the descriptions of religious rites and ceremonies as recorded by early missionaries and their successors as they followed the Delaware exodus from the East to their present stands.

In the Big House of the Delawares near Copan, Oklahoma, two images carved in the likeness of the human face were placed on opposite (east and west) sides of the center post which reached from the ground to the ridge-pole of the building. These represented the Creator, the supreme deity¹⁴ Twelve similar faces on posts, six on each side supporting the wall logs, and also on the four posts framing the eastern and western doors of the Big House, represented the deified spirit forces felt to be present where their likenesses are. Thus they were not directly worshipped as idols. The images were painted black on the left hall, red on the right. Informants also made mention of spirit forces appearing as stone faces in rock formations of nature in various parts of the country. So much for stationary face images among the Delawares of Oklahoma.

The Delawares of Oklahoma, in historic times at least, possessed a mask cult whose sphere of activity was quite different from that of the stationary images in the Big House. A single individual spirit force, anthropomorphic in character, officiates as an adjunct to the annual ceremony held in the fall. The province of this character in native theurgy (magic) lies in the custodianship of the game animals. This being is represented by a man wearing a carved mask known as “mask-spirit.” He wears not only the mask, half red, half black, but a garb simulating the traditional hairy body-covering (a bear-skin coat and leggings) of the being. He enters the ceremony of the Big House as an extraneous spirit-character. The mask-spirit seems to hold potency of both good and evil. It has power to cause sickness and to cure it, as several narratives relate. It allows hunters to kill deer over which animals it exists as a custodian. Harrington¹⁵ states concisely that it was made “guardian by the creator of all the wild animals of the forest and was sometimes seen riding on the back of a buck, herding the deer; but he lived in a range of rocky mountains.” The wearing of the mask described endowed the wearer with the power of the mask-spirit. There was a strong taboo against playing with the mask or wearing it for social masquerading. Usually in the summertime a dance and feast were given in behalf of the mask image, to provide it with enjoyment and conciliation. Dreams experienced by the owners of the mask put them under obligation to provide periodic feasts to annul malefic possibilities. The image was addressed as grandfather. Further details of the function of this mask, as given me in text by an informant state “The Delawares were given the Mask-Image so it became the rule that whoever owns that mask should take it into the Big House each year. . . . Now here he goes about frightening unruly children. When the ‘one who is our grandfather’ begs, the child is taught that he shall pay a plug of tobacco so that he will not scare them.” Harrington also stated that besides scaring children it takes care of them.¹⁶

If this mask wearer is able to see clearly for a long distance he is thought to be a man of power. He carries a snapping-turtle shell rattle and a staff of twisted wood, and utters only sounds resembling a horse whinnying, making signals with his rattle to be given tobacco. He also kicks at persons. He carries the tobacco in a side-pouch of bear skin. These are prerogatives of the mask-spirit in the guise of his human representative – an important feature of Delaware ceremonialism.

The corn-husk mask was known to the Oklahoma division of the Delawares in the capacity of a herald announcing and preparing the way for the coming of the red and black wooden False Face in a Corn Harvest Ceremony. The details of its use and meaning are taken from a text, and are as follows:¹⁷

The Delawares celebrated the conclusion of the corn or maize bearing season with a festival of thanksgiving in which acknowledgement was made to mother Corn for the blessings of abundance, and an appeal made for the continuation of health, a form of blessing never forgotten for a moment by Delaware supplicants. . . . A particular feature appears in the manner in which the Corn anniversary is announced among the people a week or so before it takes place. This feature amounts to a formalistic procedure. In this performance two messengers dressed in suits of corn husk clothing and wearing masks with corn husk “hair” ride through the Delaware settlements as a signal that the ceremony will soon occur. But they enact a strange symbol. Carrying a small quantity of excrement in a side pouch they smear the substance upon the persons of those they encounter en route who do not offer them at once a gilt no matter how trifling. . . . The purpose of this punishment for disregard of the obligation toward the messengers seems lo lie in the motive of enforcing obedience . . . to religious duties among the Delawares. . . . The individuals whose duty it is to enact this part are hence called “excrement daubers” and their identity . . . is kept in the dark.

The masks referred to are, according to the memory of Joe Washington, of the Wolf division, from whom replicas were obtained, one with black color on the forehead and chin part and red on the middle face portion, the other with the upper face area black and the lower red. The former was worn by the messenger of the Wolf division in his midday appearance, the dark upper and lower bands of color representing darkness before dawn and after sunset, the lighter center the middle of the day. The second mask was worn in the riles of early morning and evening. In the Corn Harvest dance, the Corn dance was led by the two men wearing the corn husk costumes and the masks. There is some conflict in the testimony given by informants regarding the masks; whether they were invariably of wood as described above or of corn husk. Shreds of corn stalk cover the tops of the heads of both masks mentioned (and figured in Speck 1937, 82) symbolizing hair.

A well-informed Delaware expressed the opinion that the “excrement dauber” rite belonged originally to the Shawnee, while Joe Washington himself attributed it to the Oklahoma Seneca “introduced a long while ago to the Delawares.”

Finally, we come to some observations on the significance of the face mask (the half-black and half-red one appearing in the annual ceremony) as a family possession in the tribe. Most important is the belief that it places certain obligations upon the family inheriting it and accords certain benefits as well. To insure these benefits the mask had to be remembered at least once a year by having a feast and dance given in its honor, upon which occasion the Mask Spirit was believed to be present. His favor was invoked in behalf of deer hunters since it had “ownership control” over this animal. Possible influences of evil in the form of sickness resulting if the Mask Spirit was aggravated by neglect of the feast and dance were averted by this ceremonial compensation.¹⁸ Not only was it thought to preside over the game animals but also the food supply coming from cultivated vegetation (corn, etc.). Its curative function lay in its power to remedy the effects of a “scare,” a strange malady caused by a dream of a mask and becoming frightened.

The historical background of the masking complex of the Delawares who carried the rites to Oklahoma is still a matter for speculation. I discussed some aspects of the problem in earlier publications as follows:

From Half Moon as a source comes another most significant tradition bearing upon the history of the use of the Mask and the carved images in the Big House Ceremony. According to the Delaware memory of events in the history of their ceremony the images and the Mask Spirit episode (Speck, 1931, p. 39) were formally introduced into the rite shortly before or about at the time of the arrival of Europeans. A transcript of the informant’s version is as follows:

It was relatively late, just about the time when while people were first seen by the Delawares, that they adopted the carved images as part of the ceremonial equipment of the Big House. The images were not made on the posts of the building before. A man of spiritual power had a vision of a monster residing in the East, its body covered with hair, with a face half red and half black. To prove the reality of his vision he induced a companion to accompany him traveling to the East where they finally reached the dwelling place of the monster, proving his existence. Upon this discovery they returned to their people. Having identified the monster and desiring to acquire the power to call upon him for spiritual aid when they desired it, they induced the other Delawares to allow them to carve the likenesses of the monster upon the posts of the Big House. Furthermore they innovated the rite of the False Face or Mask image (Messingk) as personified by an actor who wore the Mask and who was garbed in the bear-skin coat and leggings carrying a pouch of the same material and a large snapping-turtle shell hand-rattle. Henceforth the Mask Image figured as a potent Spirit Force in the hierarchy of the Manitto assemblage in the Big House celebration. The black-and-red-faced hairy monster possessed latent power to effect evil in the lives of men. Hence those to whom he reveals himself in a vision acquire the power to do harm, and since his presence is tolerated among the Big House spirits they may find a place among the worshipers. That is why it is not all for the exercise of the power of good. In the development of Delaware religion as ii appears in the Big House, a fault crept in.

What the meaning of this peculiar legend may be as regards the actual history of the Big House Ceremony, one is at a loss to say as yet. It would seem that the position of the Mask Spirit as a canonized Spirit Force amid the benevolent congress of Delaware deities corresponds to that of the Devil’s advocate. Before, however, we can admit the tradition as one having historical significance, a wiser analysis and wider comparison of the elements of the major ceremonies of the eastern Indians will have to be invoked. Nevertheless there seems to be a feeling current among some of the religious men with whom I talked that the Big House Ceremony has absorbed some imperfections and that this is one. (Speck, 1937, pp. 18-9.)

The only other case in the records dealing with eastern tribes where the red and black image represents an evil spiritual force is that of the Tuscarora of von Grffenried’s time (circa 1711) (See page 21).

A version of the legend accounting for the inception of the False-Face rite among the Oklahoma Delawares also comes from Fred Washington in a letter (6- 20-’49). It was in response to a request that his aged father, Ni kanipaxoxwe, “Walks ahead” (Joe Washington, acting chief of the Oklahoma Delaware division), then seriously ill, be asked to narrate the origin story as he knew it. I give it in his own words.

The reason why the Lenape (Delawares) have the False-Face lies in the event of the earthquake which took place one time in the East where they once lived. For a number of years they had no meeting house (Big House).¹⁹ So the people got worried about it and made a Big House, a large one of bark (elm?) similar to those in which they lived at that time. They began to hold their ceremonies in it until the spring-time came. While the ceremonies were going on there appeared a person standing on the roof of the Big House. He spoke to them and told them they had better slop for awhile because it was time to plant things for food for the coming winter. In the meantime the earthquake stopped.

Then the False-Face told one of the men to make a face like his. “Look at me,” he said, “and make a suit like mine. As long as you all hold a ‘church’ (Big House) every fall there will be no earthquake. And nothing will happen lo the people around you, and you will always be protected from now on as long as the Lenape hold the ceremonies every fall of the year in October.”

So this is the reason why the Lenape have the Messingk, the False-Face. And this is the story in the words of my father as remembered from what he heard years ago from the old Lenape concerning the Messingk.

Harrington, in 1910, had secured a version of the same legend with a few differences; namely, that the False Face appeared to three boys one of whom he took to his country, a rocky mountainous place not far from the earth, promising him strength and power to secure his wishes. He announced that he would be seen among the deer, herding them. He told the Delawares to carve twelve faces like his on the posts of the Big House and on the drumsticks and promised to live with them if they gave him a yearly feast and a burnt tobacco offering, and to take care of the deer and other game. His version was narrated by Chief Elk Hair who was then living.²⁰

Harrington mentions miniature masks kept as talismans by the Oklahoma Delawares. He discusses the finding of these in stone in archaeological sites in the East.²¹

It should not be overlooked as a final notation that the face images here are only implicitly associated with sex symbolism in the stationary images and as carved and colored on the sacred drumsticks. The customary red and black coloring in right and left arrangement so characteristic of Delaware religious art is not specifically assigned to male or female representation, but denotes the association of the people, both male and female, in the rites which the whole population must perform if it is to preserve life and health through the beneficence of the Creator.

Canadian Delaware: Munsee-Mahican
Summarizing the masking complex from the only source at our disposal, we have the following characteristics to present for the group of Delawares, as they designate themselves, adopted by the Six Nations Iroquois (circa 1763) and since that time resident with them on the Six Nations Reserve, Ontario. Historical evidence, family tradition and some dialectic earmarks point to this group as a mixed composite of Mahican from the upper Hudson Valley and eastward from Massachusetts and probably Connecticut which became fused with Munsee in New York State during the mission period. Here are the salient characteristics of masking, recorded from memory and tradition of an obsolete ceremony of eleven to twelve days’ duration in the Long House.

The human face representation in the form of masks represents the Creator who revealed himself to the ancient people in the form of an image in stone visible on the declivity of a mountain during one of their “migrations.” Unfortunately the mere legend survives with no clue left as to its location. Subsequently two mask images of the deity were hung on the center post of the Long House, believed to extend from the earth to the sky abode of the Creator, as representations of the event.²² These were the stationary images not worn in ritual, at which the audience directed its gaze when convened for ceremony or council.

Besides the deistic symbols on the center post, two masks having another symbolic association were kept suspended above the east and west doors of the Long House. The under lying idea is one standing alone. The two tribal groups, socially and politically fused in the colonial period and adopted by the Six Nations, symbolized their original separate nationality as people of the East and people farther west by the face images placed over the doors of their respective sides. The people of the East (the Mahican and affiliates) known as Wapanachki represented themselves by an unpainted wood or “white” mask. The Munsee ethnic group of New York and Pennsylvania west of the Hudson visioned themselves by a red-painted mask over the west door.²³ Through discussion with native sources we are justified in interpreting these paired symbols as representing the era of peace, harmony and affinity among themselves and with the formerly hostile Iroquois, which followed their incorporation into the political body of the Six Nations. The over-door masks were also stationary fixtures.

The third function of masks in this band of Delawares seems to accord in more particulars with the mask performances of the Iroquois in general. The question of derivation from the latter may be thought of as a possibility but should not be insisted upon in our present critically hesitant attitude toward the formation of conclusions on historical questions. The particulars in this case refer to the use of masks in the Bear Sacrifice Ceremony of this band, the major annual religious convocation. It took place in the early spring, occupying the people for about a fortnight in a series of rituals centering around the sacrifice of a bear. It held close connection with certain beliefs associated with the constellation Ursus Major. Here we need only refer to that part of the performances of this group in which face masks were worn. In the annual Bear Sacrifice Ceremony, a False Face Dance took place on the fifth and succeeding nights of the celebration and also in another important seasonal rite scheduled for September and known as the Corn Ripening Ceremony. Both ceremonies were held in the tribal Long House.

In the Bear Sacrifice Ceremony a company of twelve men wearing wooden false faces invaded the Long House by the two doors and boisterously crawled and stamped toward the center post, shaking their huge snapping-turtle rattles. The description of this False Face Dance of the Munsee-Mahican is important enough to deserve quotation from the source.²⁴ (Some corrective alterations from the original have been made in the quotations.)

The False Face company consisted of twelve men of which one or two were Spiritual Men. Six of them wore while masks representing the Unami moiety group and came into the Big House (Long House) creeping on the floor and entering by the west door. As they reached the interior they split into two parties of three each, going down the north and south sides of the building toward the center. By the east door the other six entered wearing red masks representing the Wapanachki moiety group and crept in two similar parties of three down the north and south sides of the House. The twelve False Faces met at the center post, stood up, and began the False Face Dance. Each of them carried a large Snapping Turtle rattle and used it with vehemence. The musical accompaniment for their act was furnished by the Singers (a special orchestra) using the little round water-drum painted red. . . . The function of the False Faces in their performance was to clear away evil spirits from the proximity of the Big House and its occupants. The chief then stood before his bench and addressed them, saying something like the following: “Take this in good part and dance the War Dance.” By this announcement he made known that the False Faces were to change from their usual role into the actions of the dance participated in by men enlisting for a war expedition . . . (The Drummers) took their seals on the two red benches west of the center post. . . . They were then prepared to chant the songs of the War Dance for the False Faces. . . . There seems to have been little to differentiate the War Dance Songs, so-called, from those of the False Face Dance. . . . The twelve False Faces performed this dramatic dance three times, al the conclusion of each performance giving the war-whoop. When the third dance of this series was finished and the whoop uttered, the False Faces suddenly ran out of the building through their respective east and west doors.

As regards the use of twelve masks in this dance, it would be safe to say that these images were probably secured by the Delaware dancers by the Indian-to-Indian trade of native-made objects on the Reserve, and that they were not of strictly Delaware make or style throughout, but of the Iroquois types. This situation holds for the masks used today by those who own and use them. Most of them, if not recently made, have passed through many hands and served in rituals of the different tribal groups of the Six Nations on the Reserve. No particulars could be noted down from the Delaware informants concerning their own mask types of the False Face Dance, nor do specimens of them survive except for the one example obtained by Harrington and figured in his study. It has to be left to an understanding of what goes on in reservation life where a number of tribal groups are incorporated into the dominant political and economic body.

In the Corn Ripening Ceremony the wooden-mask dancers were replaced by a company of three men wearing corn-husk masks, naked except for the breech cloth, led by another man without mask but carrying a long staff. They entered the Long House by both doors. They also converged upon the center post, crawling so that they “swept” the floor of the building to purge it from evil spiritual influences, especially disease. They performed a dance, each standing in one place, not circling around, at the center post.²⁵

Sex symbolism and directional orientation stand out as adjunct features of masking in the social arrangement of this group of Delawares. It is indicated by the colors red and black, respectively male and female, and the orientation is red for the west and white for the east. The symbolism of sex associated with red and black is likewise noteworthy in the social tradition of the Oklahoma Delawares.

The above accounts of masking performances practiced among the Munsee-Mahican of the Six Nations Delaware band refers to a period which terminated about the middle of the last century in their Long House. The Long House ceremonies were then summarily discontinued upon conversion to Christianity. The account rests upon the testimony of tradition among old informants now deceased. One cannot be sure that there did not formerly exist among these Indian groups other attributes of the masking complex which have escaped observation by early writers and been forgotten now by the people themselves. If, however, spectacularly impressive masked performances have once existed in the religious program of a people they are not so likely to fade entirely out of memory, unless they come under the direct attack of missionaries.

An important feature is that the face images in the Munsee-Mahican Long House are not stationary carvings on the center post and over the doors, but face-masks hung there which could be taken down and used as masks in other rites. The Oklahoma Delawares differ in this particular, for the images in the Big House (or Long House) are permanent carvings in their respective positions. I shall make a conjecture on this point that the fixed images are precedent to the removable mask visages in the historical background of Delaware ceremonialism, and therefore represent an older era in the sacred furnishings of the tribal place of holy convocation. The inference here is based on the general assumption that permanent fixtures in architecture are temporally anterior to mobile ones. Are general assumptions to be vehemently ruled od of historical analysis of comparative ethnological study?

Canadian Munsee-Delaware
Besides the Six Nations band of Delawares which I have called Munsee-Mahican in various publications, there are two more groups in Ontario which have been more definitely classified as Munsee or Minsi.²⁶ One is located at Munceytown, the other at Moraviantown. The dialect of Delaware spoken by the latter has not been adequately placed as yet. Whatever the case may be, we are obliged to follow Harrington for the identity of these groups and to accept his data on the use of masks in ceremonies recorded by him from informants whose knowledge was traditional. These bands have been converts to Christianity for almost two centuries. Families composing them have, through vicissitudes of colonial struggles, been drawn from almost anywhere in “Delaware” territory. A close examination of Harrington’s descriptions of ceremonies and mask rites leaves us in considerable confusion as to band or tribal provenience, since he unwittingly combined data from all of them under the single identity of Munsee, whereas the groups were composed of converts gathered from various parts of the late historic Delaware- speaking area. This also applies to the Delawares of the Six Nations whom Harrington²⁷ has also called Munsee (Minsi). I have given them the identity of Munsee-Mahican. His description of masking practices of this group is very short and, while differing in some respects from mine, it coincides in others. It is evident that the confusion of facts recorded in accounts of ceremonies and mask usages from the groups in question actually refers to different cults or septs among these composite bands at different times and perhaps in different places from whence their traditions of religious procedures were derived . . . variable, “fluid” social composites.

For the Munsee proper of Munceytown, Harrington records the center post of the Big House as “bearing carved faces,” and says that masked groups “formed a society with special rites to expel disease.” At Munceytown they did not have the single individual mask rite noted for the Oklahoma Delawares²⁸ (which division, incidentally, he calls Unami). There was a masked society of twelve members who never appeared in the Big House (Long House). They wore bear or deerskin costumes, carried turtle shell rattles and uttered peculiar nasal sounds. They went about throwing ashes on people to prevent disease and purify homes. The masks here were described to him as having “brass eyes and a crooked nose,” and when a man put on a mask he received the power of this spirit and could cure disease.²⁹ Harrington logically drew the conclusion that their behavior was much like that of the Iroquois. (Cayuga) in whose proximity they lived.

Small wooden masks (two or three inches long), identical with those made and used by the Cayuga neighbors of the Delawares on the Six Nations Reserve, have been collected among the Munsee-Mahican both recently and in past years. That these maskettes are, however, a part of the Delaware system of curing may reasonably be questioned because a Delaware patient applying to an Iroquois doctor for diagnosis and treatment of a mental or physical complaint would receive one of these images as part of the “medicine” prescribed for his relief. These miniatures of the regular life-sized False Face Society’s masks constitute one of the “medicinal” agencies (Cayuga specifically) given to a patient to retain as a talisman for continued health protection by one of the Iroquois chiefs who, as ”doctor,” has guessed the cause of the patient’s ailment in a consultation held with the sufferer in the Long House. We have as yet no direct testimony for the existence of the Dream Guessing Rite in the curative practices among the small group of Munsee-Mahican themselves.

The remains of large and small stone faces, found in the regions once occupied by various branches of the diffuse Delaware Nation, have been placed by archaeological authorities in the categories of fixed images and protective talismans. While these classifications are as yet mere assumptions, they seem to coincide with some of the uses which wooden icons serve in the historic ethnology of the same people. The stone maskettes may be thought of as prototypes of the small wooden and corn-husk masks still serving the Iroquois as “guardians of health” and the Delawares as personal charms (known as páolax and páwalax in different dialects of the Delaware tongue).³⁰

Harrington describes the appearance of small human face-images, half black, half red, on the carved drumsticks used in the annual ceremony as representing the sexes, implying that man and woman were giving thanks to the Creator.³¹

Canadian Munsee – Munsee of Ontario
The available information on mask practices of this band of the Delaware national body comes from M. R. Harrington.³² It is less extensive than what we have from the other branches of the Delaware Nation. His source matter comes from the Minsi (Munsee) of Munceytown, Ontario, and the Munsee-speaking Delawares (Munsee-Mahican of my nomenclature) of the Six Nations Reserve which he also specifies as Minsi. Harrington does not observe the distinctions of local and historical differentiation which I am convinced should be ethnologically observed between these two bands of people who, although using Munsee idioms, have (more, perhaps than we can now realize) carried down ritual traditions springing from different districts of the once wide zone occupied by the Munsee before their concentration into missions in New York and Pennsylvania. He has fused the brief and fragmentary data remembered by informants in both bands into a single account of the annual ceremony and its masking traits.³³ This approach to ethnological treatment of involved questions of religious source material has, I believe, proved inadvisable. It disregards what we now discern as geographical variation within a wide area inhabited by people who may even constitute a fairly uniform dialectic group. I therefore give an abstract resume of his brief remarks on the Munsee of Munceytown.

Harrington notes that the idea of the origin myth of the adoption of the human face after it was first revealed to the people in the rocks checks with the Munsee-Mahican explanatory legend.³⁴ Two carved likenesses of the deifying human face were carved on the center post of the Munsee Big House. In the annual ceremony the two drumsticks were forked at the end and carved with faces on one side representing the women and the men.³⁵ Munsee masks, one of which he obtained from a Delaware informant at Grand River and considered as typical, were of wood with brass or copper eyes and crooked nose, and, quoting Jones, he adds that they had tufts of hair, feathers, and jingling copper cones or deer hoofs. The mask he himself obtained had lines burnt into the wood and was not painted. He does not mention its having the face painted half red and half black, but shows it in a cut as having long hair (horse tail?). Munsee maskers wore deer-skin or bear-skin costumes and carried turtle-shell rattles, a staff, and cried “O, O,” as do the Iroquois False Faces. The mask and its spiritual prototype is called misíng^w. The men owning these masks formed a society of twelve members. They met in a special meeting house where their dances were held.

Unlike the Oklahoma Delawares, no masked dancer appeared in the annual Big House Ceremony, and nothing is said by Harrington about the mask (misíng^w) being the owner of the deer and game animals. The Munsee masked cult threw ashes on the sick to cure them. They also went about the settlement stopping at the different houses to beg for tobacco offerings and exorcise evil spirits. Harrington reaches the conclusion, from having compared his material on Iroquois mask performances with his first-hand Canadian Munsee data, that the latter resembled the Iroquois more than the “Unami” Delawares of Oklahoma.³⁶

Shawnee (Oklahoma)

The information on face-mask uses among the Shawnee now located in Oklahoma comes entirely from the notes of Dr. Erminie W. Voegelin, who has kindly placed them at my disposal for abstracting:

The Eastern and Cherokee Shawnee had two corn-husk maskers (“shuck-faces”). The Absentee Shawnee never had any. Their costumes, besides the mask with silver dollars pierced with a hole lor eyes, and a long (6″) nose, and a tiny round opening for a mouth, were a com-shuck headdress and tight, while trousers. Two men so arrayed visited houses in spring and fall signalling the people to come out. If the latter did not give them tobacco at once the maskers smeared their hands with manure. They did not cure, but plagued people and frightened children. They had no connection with the annual ceremony of the Bread Dance. Called in to frighten away an epidemic. Another informant stated that they accompanied the wooden False Faces around as “head reporters,” wearing little bells around the waist. Shuck Mask about 28″ in diameter. Hair and body covered with deerskin union-suit garment with hair left on to prevent recognition. They aggravated the wooden False Faces, who gave them tobacco at the end of their ritual. When they danced they were accompanied by someone beating on a board with a little stick.

The Eastern Shawnee had wooden False Faces worn by men who had had a dream of an animal. If anyone else wore a mask he would not be able to see through the eye-slits. The Eastern and Cherokee Shawnee had also three False Faces which they left in Kansas when they moved. With these went a bearskin costume. One mask was half red, half black and worn by the leader. The other two were painted like facial painting, red cheeks, stripes, etc. Mask wearers treated sick patients by making lire and taking hot coals in hands to heat them to blow on patient. The mask gives its wearer the power of vision to see through the clothing of women to the naked body. False Faces were called “grandfathers.” Man using mask did not have power in himself to doctor but only through the mask. False Face company went about twice each year (May, September) to “scare away” diseases from each house, preceding the Bread Dance by about a week. Three wearers of wood masks and three of shuck-masks selected by old men. Maskers wore bearskin costume, carried turtle-shell rattle and a cane. Shuck-faces heralded approach of False Face party at each house. Inside they rubbed inmates, walls, beds, etc. with the rattles. If asked, they danced as well, receiving tobacco as payment. False Faces never talked but motioned. Frightened children to make them obedient. Stayed out in bushes over-night and ate only mush. Masks kept in rock cave. Informants agreed that False Face riles were of Seneca (Oklahoma) origin and were restricted to the Mekoce (Mekoshe) division of the Shawnee when taken over. Men of this division wearing corn shuck masks, basket hats, and “stuck all over with feathers,” were called lo cure epidemics in villages. Having their hands smeared with cow or human dung they went to all the houses shaking the hands of everybody to save them from the contagion.

The foregoing notes, somewhat garbled in arrangement because they are too non-uniform to harmonize from traditions of persons who had heard of them, are given as Dr. Voegelin’s note entries have them. Besides, the notes refer to practices known in different subdivisions of the Shawnee tribe which vary in the direction of customary habits in rites and ceremonies. The essentials, however, seem clear enough for the purpose of this short compilation of masking data. It seems to stand beyond doubt that the Shawnee and Delawares of Oklahoma, in the late historic period at least, had taken on some traits of each other’s performances. Furthermore we may accept the statement as given that the Shawnee had most of theirs from the Seneca wooden False Face performances, perhaps even after their removal to Oklahoma.

The Shawnee are members of the Central and Eastern Algonkian cultural fraternity who, like the Delawares, emigrated westward early in the last century. Their historical and ethnic affinities are by and large with the Delawares.

Carolina Coastal Algonkian

The existence of stationary face images carved on posts forming a ceremonial enclosure is attested by the two drawings of John White, who depicted phases of life of the Algonkian-speaking aboriginals of the Carolina coast at the close of the sixteenth century. From this remarkable source we learn that seven (in one picture) and (in another) eight posts, about man-height and arranged in a circle, had human-like faces carved at the top. These faced inward and in the space they enclosed persons were performing a dance with gourd rattles in one hand and what appear to be twigs in the other. No intimation worth quoting is given as to what rite is being celebrated. Regarding White’s picture with an objective eye, we can only surmise that a ritual dance is in progress. As in similar cases of the earliest pictorial accounts, we may find a tentative explanation by comparison with similar characteristics manifested by related ethnic groups which are better known. In this particular instance we can turn to the Delaware as being the nearest ceremonial possessing features with any semblance of correspondence.

It was in the village of Secotan, a fairly populous settlement of the Carolina Sound Algonkian culture local sub-area as defined by Dr. M. A. Meek, that White represented the dance circle. The seven and eight image-carved posts may reasonably be supposed to represent spirit forces before which the dancers are performing a singing and dancing rite. If it be acceptable to regard these images as being intended as witnesses to the devotions of the people, then the point is made that there is an analogy with the Delaware case, for in the Big House of the latter there were six upright side posts carved with faces (painted half red and half black) functioning in a similar capacity. All Big House rituals were enacted within the open space in the center of the enclosure, which differed from the Secotan one in being rectangular instead of circular and in being roofed and walled instead of an open-air shrine. Were one to consider such matters broadly, the latter differences could be attributed to climatic differences in the two zones of latitude. The stationary images would serve the same purpose in all events; and that is the point here.

One is further impressed by the indication in White’s Secotan pictures that the dance represents an agricultural rite of fertilization or thanksgiving for crops as suggested by the appearance of gourd rattles and twigs of plant growths in the performers’ hands. This extends the analogy with Delaware and Middle Atlantic Slope dance festivals directed to the spirits of growing things.

Wabanaki, Northern New England, and Maritime Provinces, Canada.

For the Wabanaki and Micmac area south of the St. Lawrence we have no evidence whatever, either in the past or present, of the use of face images.** To the west of these divisions one can only look toward the territory of the Mahican as a possibility that in their ceremonial complex the mask found a place. Attention will be given shortly to the mask question here which has ethnic implications with that of the Munsee.

Turning to the southward from the Wabanaki area, the same absence of evidence is revealed in southern New England. None of the groups southward to Long Island and westward to the Hudson are reported as having used masks.

PERIPHERAL GROUPS

(Algonkian, Siouan, Eskimo Stocks)

Labrador Eskimo

The occurrence of skin masks among Eskimo of the east coast of Labrador was reported by me for the first time in a short article in an obscure literary vehicle in 1935.³⁷ A series of specimens was collected from the Eskimo of Nain by Mr. Richard White, Jr., and others by me at Saint Anthony, where I had an opportunity to make notes and photographs showing performances of a group of the people from this territory.

In the Nain Labrador dialect the mask is Ki·na·wák. The masks are representative of the human face so far as present information goes and not of animals. (Some animal forms have since been learned of the bat for instance.) Nor has Mr. White been able to secure testimony from natives at Nain or Cape Chidley as yet to connect the mask representations with animal or “tunit” spirits. They are employed in the winter season around Christmas time (December and January) when the people are gathered in the coast villages. The mask performer is a sell-appointed man who appears in the houses for the express purpose of making the company laugh by his lewd and comic antics for which he receives presents of sweets or tobacco. His entrance into a house where company is assembled creates an uproar and no little consternation among the children and adults. As he goes from house to house he is followed by a crowd of merrymakers. His entry is the occasion for requests to sing on the part of the audience. And the mask wearer may also call upon the company for songs. He indulges in boisterous and grotesque antics. He wears old and tattered garments, an old worn-out deerskin “dickey” and fur hat for instance, carrying a stick for a staff to guide his awkward steps. The occasion is one for the display of tricks of amusement by any and all. Original ideas may be introduced into the mask performance but the general pattern is as given, and the masks made for the event are usually in conformity with traditional rulings. For instance the materials out of which masks are made are chiefly dog-skin and sealskin decorated with dog-skin appendages. . . .

To sum up the data it seems that Labrador Eskimo mask performances are in the nature of semiformal competitive dramatic comedies, social festivals without religious meaning at present. So far as the present life of the east coast Labrador people is concerned they are to be classed with those acts so frequent in Eskimo culture intended to provoke mirth as an antidote to the depressing influences of the long winter nights. They involve at the same time an element of dramatic action, yet to what extent we are unable to say until some of the songs and repartee indulged in by the audience and by the masked actors have been recorded.

I witnessed an evening’s entertainment at St. Anthony, in which the usual Eskimo tricks and amusements were produced by a small company of people from Nain. There was walk-across-the-floor by children on their bent knees, holding the feet tight to the rear of the thighs by their hands, dancing by squatting and kicking one foot out before them while balanced on the opposite foot, then jumping free with both feet, folding the arms and falling forward on the floor with rigid body and landing with a crash on the points of the elbows, and finally the appearance of a masked figure waddling into the room with arms and legs inserted into the sleeves of a canvas dickey. Our evidence seems to make the point that masking is, in recent times, only a clowning performance among the Eskimo of the east coast of Labrador, whatever its former symbolism may have been before the mission period.

Naskapi, Barren Ground and UngavaBands. Labrador Peninsula

The Naskapi Indians of the interior of the northern Labrador plateau were also reported by Mr. White as possessing skin masks. Specimens were obtained through him which show some features identical with those of the neighboring Eskimo. Some were made of tanned caribou-skin, smoked and painted, and some of seal skin. However, insufficient ethnological detail concerning their use prevents saying more of their functions at present. It would, nevertheless, seem reasonable to conclude from the meager data available that a common tie binds the Labrador Naskapi and Eskimo mask usage together historically.

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² My own observations of Iroquois masking, published by the University of Penna. Press, specifically referring to the Cayuga of the Sour Springs subdivision of the Six Nations, Ontario, do not diverge from the generalizations given in Fenton’s monograph. Therefore I have used his summary as a basis for this section of my study. The Long House performances of the different bands on reservations on both sides of the international border show some local variations of the over-all pattern as may be expected among peoples of separate tribal and dialectic identity distributed over such a wide range of territory in the past and present. ↪
³ Fenton, op. cit., 416-417. ↪
⁴ Ibid., 417. ↪
⁵ Speck, 1949. Univ. of Penna. ↪
⁶ Ibid. ↪
⁷ Fenton, op. cit. 410. ↪
⁸ To account for the prominence of the pig in later historic Iroquois ritual, Fenton, 1940, 230, n. 27, traced its early substitution for the bear as the principal Seneca feast-food partaken of in religious rites. He cites reference to recent students of introduced animals (Bailey, 1933) estimating the introduction of the pig to New World economy at Quebec about 1620 (incidentally, long before the horse arrived, about 1665). I have found among the Canadian Cayuga a belief that the pig head as a ritual food replaced a “tusked being” which is presumed to be the bear. ↪
⁹ Speck. F. G., and Broom, L.-Cherokee Dances and Drama, Univ. of Cal. Press, Berkeley (In press). ↪
* The mask with coiled snake illustrated on PI. VII is, however, described by its collectors (Speck and Witthoft) as one worn in war dances to signify a warrior’s intention to fight. (Ed.) ↪
¹⁰ Ir is a cause of some surprise that an ethnologist could put so much time in the study of a single people like the Cherokee as James Mooney did and not be impressed by its masking customs. His association with the tribe was at a time when old persons were living who could supply more than we can now record concerning early customs, yet there is nothing on the subject of masking in his lengthy published material (Mooney, 1886-98). Frans Olbrechts also gives no account of Cherokee masks, although he figures a Booger mask in one of his plates. (Olbrechts, 1932, 117.) ↪
¹¹ Speck, 1931, 35-36. ↪
¹² Harrington (1908, 1921). ↪
¹³ Speck (1931, 1937). ↪
¹⁴ Speck, 1931, 30. ↪
¹⁵ Harrington, 1921, 32-3. ↪
¹⁶ Harrington, 1921, 156. ↪
¹⁷ Speck, 1937, 79,90. ↪
¹⁸ Speck, 1931, 50. ↪
¹⁹ Speck, 1932, 81; 1937, 18; 1942, 57-61. ↪
²⁰ Harrington, 1921, 147-9. ↪
²¹ Harrington, 1921, 36, 38, 41. ↪
²² Speck, 1945, 41-2. ↪
²³ Speck, 1945, 38 diagram, 39-40. ↪
²⁴ Ibid., 75. ↪
²⁵ Speck, 1945, 29. ↪
²⁶ Harrington, 1921. ↪
²⁷ Harrington, 1908; 1921, 138-143. ↪
²⁸ Harrington, Ibid., 127-138 passim. ↪
²⁹ Ibid., 159. ↪
³⁰ Harrington, 1921; Speck, 1932. ↪
³¹ Harrington, 1921, pp. 130, 141 and fig. 15a. ↪
³² Harrington, 1921, 129, 158-161 ↪
³³ Ibid., 138-145; 129. ↪
³⁴ Speck, I941. ↪
³⁵ Harrington, op. cit., 129. ↪
³⁶ Harrington, 158-61. ↪
** See, however, table on p. 56, under “Wabanaki.” (Ed.) ↪
³⁷ Speck, 1935, 158-73. ↪