MASKED MEDICINE SOCIETIES OF THE IROQUOIS 



By WiLLLVM N. Fen TON 

 Bureau of American Ethnology 



[With 25 plates] 

 INTRODUCTION 



The Iroquois of New York and Ontario are among our oldest 

 reservation Indians. Since the Revolution they have occupied di- 

 minishing areas within their ancient domain, and during the last 

 century their settlements have been within marketing distance of 

 large white trading centers that have become important eastern 

 cities. It is a curious circumstance that Iroquois culture has not 

 entirely disappeared in the face of our own civilization. Perhaps 

 this is because it is only recently that the cities have grown and 

 reached out to engulf the reservation communities. The older In- 

 dian people complain increasingly that the modern generation are 

 failing to learn Indian languages or participate enthusiastically in 

 tribal ceremonies. Nevertheless, within a day's journey from New 

 York City there survive five conservative Iroquois communities in 

 which, semiannually in spring and fall, the faithful leaders of the 

 Society of Faces manage to muster enough ragged zealots to wear 

 wooden masks and drive disease from their houses. The ethnolo- 

 gist may then, if he chooses, witness ancient ceremonies almost in 

 his dooryard without going to the Southwest. 



Longhouse groups. — The conservative Iroquois conmiunities are 

 located near the centers where Handsome Lake, the Seneca prophet, 

 preached during the first 15 years of the nineteenth century, and on 

 the reserves to which his disciples emigrated. These "real" or 

 "longhouse people" live clustered about a dance house or ceremonial 

 structure, called the longhouse, where they gather for social and 

 religious purposes. The longhouse fires yet burn on the Onondaga 

 Reservation near Syracuse (pi. 1, fig. 1) and on the three Seneca 

 reservations neighboring Buffalo. The so-called Pagan Senecas 

 kindle their fires at Tonawanda, at Coldspring on the Allegheny 

 River, and at Newtown on Cattaraugus Reservation. Descendants 

 of the Iroquois who moved west of the Niagara River into Can- 

 ada at the close of the Revolution to settle along the banks of 



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