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Iroquois Supernatural: Culture, Commodity, Sacred, and Spooky
I have great friends. One of them recently found a copy of Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People by Michael Bastine and Mason Winfield at a yard sale and was kind enough to pick it up for me as a gift. Bastine is an Algonquin healer and elder. Winfield is a European American who describes himself as a “supernatural historian.”
This is a really neat, informative book. It is chock-full of fascinating tales, keen historical and cultural insights, and a pervasive sense of respect for the Iroquois culture(s) as a whole. I’m mentioning it not to provide a thorough review. My review can be summed up thusly: If you’re the sort of person who is interested in Native American cultures and particularly Native American mythology and folklore, get this book!
I’m bringing this book up, rather, for the guidance it may provide for writers wanting to handle mythological material from outside their culture with reverence and sensitivity. This is a topic that has recently come up in an article at Fantasy Faction by Brian O’Sullivan with respect to Celtic, and particularly Irish cultural artifacts. (You can also read my observations.)
As when I wrote about the uproar over J. K. Rowling’s handling of Native American mythology, I still believe that there are situations where leaving elements of Native American or African mythology out of a story can be more colonialistic than including them. I’m thinking particularly of stories in the contemporary fantasy genre that are set in North America—which happens to be what I write. Populating North America with unicorns and griffins rather than naked bears and great horned serpents strikes me as a lazy and Euro-centric way to tell a story.
Still, the challenge remains to handle these cultural artifacts with care and not treat them as mere commodities. Here is where Bastine and Winfield’s concerns in writing Iroquois Supernatural intersect with my own admittedly different concerns. First and most basically, writers who want to include these kinds of cultural artifacts need to read lots of books like this one, written from a clearly sympathetic viewpoint.
Second, the authors draw a distinction between what they classify as “the sacred” and “the spooky.” This is a distinction that especially writers from outside a given culture need to keep in mind. In the introduction, they write:
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? (p. 2)
But then they proceed to explain their preference for the spooky over the sacred:
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 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? (p. 2)
This comment reminds me of the privileged place Judeo-Christian supernaturalism has in my own culture. Perhaps it will remind you of something else in your own frame of reference. But the writers go on to admit that within Iroquois society itself there are distinctions between the sacred and the spooky. They conclude,
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. (p. 3)
Even so, the authors admit that it isn’t always easy to draw firm lines between sacred and spooky. The fact that one of the authors is a practicing traditional healer within a neighboring Native American community is bound to help in this regard! Later on, we hear Winfield explaining further about their approach to this cultural material:
This is not a book about Iroquois religion or anything else we knew was sacred enough to be sensitive. Not only is that not our purpose, but, as a Mohawk friend said recently to me, “If it’s sacred, you don’t know it.” And coauthor Michael Bastine would not reveal it. (p. 22)
So perhaps we can isolate the following touchstones as the beginning of an approach to including cultural material from marginalized or minority groups within our society:
- Aim for the spooky, not the sacred. Frankly, I’m not interested in writing philosophical or theological treatises on the spirituality of marginalized peoples. (I will admit to a certain interest in reading such studies.) But I love stories about ghosts, monsters, trickster figures, or what have you. As Bastine and Winfield themselves note numerous times, these sorts of things are common to every culture. That suggests to me that, with suitable awareness, writers can fruitfully explore them. If something gets too close to the lived faith commitments of others, however, I tend to want to shy away from it in terms of worldbuilding and storytelling,
- If it is sacred enough to be sensitive, leave it out. I’m well aware that one reaches a point of sensitivity sooner in some cultures than others, and with different topics in some cultures than in others. Still, is there a better place to start?
- Strive to understand as much about the culture as a whole as possible. I don’t want to add a cultural element to a story without a firm grasp of how that element relates to others in its “native” environment. Understanding the ins and outs of a culture and its history is a great inoculation against a grab-bag approach.
Do you think it’s possible for writers to handle other world cultures with sensitivity? When have you seen a writer handle well the artifacts of a culture to which he or she was an outsider?
Classifying Native American Little People (1)
When I first started writing Children of Pride, I knew I wanted the story to reflect great cultural diversity. That’s why you’ll find the world of Taylor Smart populated not only with the traditional faeries of European folklore but also with mythological creatures from North America and Africa. The mundane United States is a diverse melting pot, so why not its faery realm?
But how to bring together the often contradictory takes on spirit-folk, little people, or what have you? Admittedly, this would still be a problem if I had limited myself to a single culture’s folklore—the various stories aren’t easily harmonized. Adding in different cultures just ramped up a problem I already knew I’d face.
To deal with the problem, I made two decisions. First, I decided that no culture would be shown to be 100% correct in their faery beliefs. I would try to account for as much of the cultural data as I could, but in the end, I was the writer. It was my fantasy universe, and everybody would have to play by my rules.
Second, I decided that the countless faeries and faery-like beings of world mythology should actually fall into a small number of “templates” or “archetypes”: tricksters, satyrs, nature spirits, domestic spirits, elementals, etc. This provided a level of uniformity against which the beings found in particular cultures or mythologies could serve as variations on a theme.
In light of this second decision, I was delighted to find a recent blog post by Mason Winfield in which he has developed a different (to me) way of classifying the “little people” of Iroquois folklore. In this post, I want to summarize Winfield’s model. In a follow-up, I’ll see how the model might apply to the faery folk of other Native American cultures.
A Three-Tribe Model
Winfield’s post, by the way, is an excellent primer on the faery folk of northern Europe as well as their transatlantic cousins. His specialty, however, is in the legends of the Iroquois of upstate New York. He writes,
Most Algonquian-language groups call their Little People “Puckwudgies.” The Iroquois / Haudenosaunee people nickname them “Jungies.” Their correspondences to the Celtic wee folk are remarkable. Their wonted sites in New York State are intricate natural spaces: a stairstep waterfall, a natural gas well, a curious valley.
He goes on to explain how, in the older versions of these legends, the Iroquois conceived of three tribes of “Jungies” that “embody the three functions of the fairies worldwide.” These are the “Hunters,” who share a close connection with the Underworld; the “Plant Growers,” who are linked to the natural world and its cycles; and the “Stone Throwers,” who are most likely to be seen by human beings and hence, by human children. I have described these three tribes in an earlier post about the Jogaoh, from which the term “Jungies” no doubt comes.
A Two-Tribe Model
So, here we have what we might call a “three-tribe model” of the little people. Winfield notes, however, that by the mid-twentieth century, most people who held to these beliefs seemed to report only two tribes. He explains,
The American literary and social critic Edmund Wilson (Apologies to the Iroquois, 1960) found only two of the fairy nations surfacing in living report. Wilson (1895-1972) called them, “Healers” and “Tricksters.”
Winfield confirms that his own Native American contacts say the same. So does his colleague, Michael Bastine, whose area of specialty is the Algonquin culture (in Québec and Ontario). I can’t find reference to “Healers” and “Tricksters” in the Google Books version of Apologies to the Iroquois, but that can be chalked up to the relevant pages being blocked out.
Winfield proposes that the “Healers” are an updated version of the “Plant Growers.” Given the strong connection between plant lore and herbal medicine and Native American healing traditions, this makes perfect sense.
As for the “Tricksters,” their origins are a bit more murky—and they themselves are more foreboding. In 1975, Tuscarora Chief Elton Greene sat for an interview with Virginia Scipione, a librarian at the Lewiston (NY) Public Library. The typewritten transcript of this interview is preserved on the library’s web page. In it, Chief Greene discusses, among other things, legends he has heard about the “little people” from Elias Johnson. According to Chief Greene,
[H]e has told me a lot when I was small of the legends and traditions of what it used to be like in the early days. There is one that is very interesting to everybody about the dwarfs or very small persons. What we call in our language ______.* That means a degraded human race. He told me they were about 28 to 30 inches tall and he had seen them lots of times when he was a boy, when he was small. They liked to play around the trees. They liked to fool around with the children and the parents don’t like that because they claim that they will give peculiar spirits to the children if they let them fool around them because they are very smart. They have seen their tracks a lot of times on the highways. His mother at night (he used to live in a little log house just a little ways from there and they had a fireplace) said they would climb up there and go thru the chimney. They would come down there during the summer. They would make noise and wake them up and then they would run back up there. They would build a little fire to keep them out.
To summarize, Winfield perceives two basic categories of “little people.” On the one hand are the “Healers,” immensely powerful beings who are generally kind and helpful to humans (though they can still be dangerous if insulted). On the other hand are the “Tricksters,” a “degraded human race” whose members are mischievous and perhaps even malevolent. They are not, however, generally in the same “weight class” as those in the first category.
Furthermore, Winfield suggests this classification works cross-culturally. It holds up not only in the context of Iroquois culture but also Algonquin.
In my next post, I want to test this classification against some of the Native American cultures of the Southeast.
* The name is left blank in the typewritten transcript. Apparently, it should be “oogweshiya.” At least, that is how it is rendered on the Lewiston Public Library page where the interview is introduced.
Jogaoh: Iroquois Fair Folk
Masked Iroquois dancer
The Iroquois Confederacy was made up of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk tribes. In the folklore of all of these are stories of the jogaoh. Like the nunnehi of the Cherokee, jogaoh are generally more favorable toward humans than their European counterparts. (The Cherokee and the Iroquois are actually distantly related; the Cherokee language is in fact classified as “Southern Iroquoian.”) The Fair Folk of the Huron-Wyandot peoples, another Iroquoian group, are of a similar nature.
Their name is sometimes translated as “dwarves,” “pygmies,” or “little people.” They often appear as tiny humanoids, perhaps only inches tall. As with most Fair Folk, however, appearances can be deceiving as some of these beings are expert shapeshifters.
These beings are actually an alliance or confederacy of three distinct “tribes.”
Gahongas
Of the three tribes of jogaoh, gahongas most often have dealings with humans. They inhabit rocks and rivers. In Huron-Wyandot lore, these beings are able to come and go through living rock. Guardians of streams, they dwell in caves along the banks. They are especially concerned with fishing. They direct the movements of fish, give them shelter in their deep-water caves, and protect them from those who would over-fish their waters. They can command a fruitful or a barren fishing season, and frequently punish wrongdoing with famine.
Gahongas are sometimes called “stone-throwers” because of their love of a particular game that involves tossing large stones back and forth. They thus possess incredible strength, far in excess to what might be expected given their size. In fact, is is said that “they can uproot the largest tree by a twist of the hand, and hurl massive rocks into the rivers, to lift the waters when floods threaten” (William M. Beauchamp, Iroquois Folk Lore [Dehler, 1922] 46).
Gahongas sometimes visit mortals and lead them to their dwelling-places, where they challenge them to feats of strength. Other mortal visitors are instructed in the Gahongas’ magical secrets: mysticism, exorcism, and dances. As with many stories from Europe, when these visitors return to the mortal realm, they may discover that many years have passed, while it seemed to them they were only gone for a short while.
Gandayahs
Gandayahs are associated with plants and plant growth. As a kindred of the fruits and grains, they are the most favored of humankind and most beloved by them. They are beings of sunshine who bring joy and happiness to mortals. In the springtime, they hide in dark, sheltered places and coax the earth to bring forth its fruit. Then, in the summer, they wander over the fields, tinting the grains and ripening the fruits. They also fend of blights and diseases of plants that threaten the harvest.
In times of drought, the Iroquois might search in the wilderness for small cup-shaped hollows in the soft earth. These are fashioned into “dew cup charms” meant to attract the gandayahs and coax them to begin their work.
It is said that they are especially fond of strawberries. According to one legend, an evil spirit once stole the strawberry plant and hid it under the ground for centuries until it was finally rescued by a sunbeam, who carried it back to the mortal world. Ever after, the gandayahs have kept a special guard over this fruit, the ripening of which marks the beginning of their yearly work.
They frequently visit the mortal realm in various forms, especially birds. If they come as a robin, it bodes good tidings. An owl, however, is a word of warning that an enemy is coming to deceive. A bat denotes a life-and-death struggle close at hand. Even harmless insects and worms might bear important messages for the attentive mortal to discern.
Ohdowas
These beings are devoted to hunting. Although they are small, they are sturdy and brave. They dwell deep beneath the soil in subterranean realms where no sunlight penetrates. Many different kinds of animals inhabit this land, many of which are dangerous to mortals. The ohdowas strive to prevent the poisonous serpents and other grim creatures from reaching the surface of the earth. Beauchamp explains,
In the dim world where the Oh-do-was live are deep forests and broad plains, where roam the animals whose proper abode is there, and though all that live there wish to escape, yet both good and bad, native and captive, are bidden to be content and dwell where fate has placed them. Among the mysterious underearth denizens are the white buffaloes, who are tempted again and again to gain the earth’s surface, but the paths to the light are guarded, and the white buffalo must not climb to the sunlight, to gallop with his brown brothers over the plains. Sometimes they try to rush up and out, and then the Oh-do-was rally their hunters, and thin out the unruly herds with their arrows. ‘Tis then that a messenger is sent above to tell the sunlight elves that the chase is on, and the earth elves hang a red cloud high in the heavens, as a sign of the hunt. Ever alert for signals the Indian reads the symbol of the red cloud, and rejoices that the Little People are watchful and brave. (48)
In addition to protecting the surface world from monsters, ohdowas are also the “warriors” of jogaoh culture, charged with hunting down wrongdoers and bringing them to justice.
Darrell J. Pursiful 