IROQUOIS — FENTON 405 



nize in a similar form in the writings of the seventeenth century Jesuit 

 missionaries, and from this we infer that the present role of "sponsor" 

 has a historical depth of 300 years and that it is probably aboriginal. 

 Tliis helps to explain why the business of feast-making permeates 

 all of Iroquois ceremonialism.^^ 



Finally, to place the complex of Iroquois masked shamanism in 

 ethnographic perspective the comparative method might be employed. 

 If we can show that the complex has a historical depth reaching back 

 to the first white contacts with the Iroquois, it would be relevant to 

 investigate whether the Iroquois possess the complex in a greater degree 

 of detail than their Algonquian neighbors. If we could determine 

 the center whence masking spread throughout the northeast, some 

 light might shine on the problem of whether Iroquois masking is a 

 diagnostic trait pointing to their alleged southern origin, or whether 

 it is related to northern shamanism and the use of masks across the 

 Arctic littoral, or whether the complex was original with the Iroquois 

 themselves from whom it spread to the neighboring Delaware. How- 

 ever, it is beyond the scope of this present paper to do more than stake 

 out this problem. 



MASK TYPES 



The wooden masks or False-faces. — ^A few museum visitors may 

 appreciate that the weird human likenesses which mock them from the 

 showcases are actually memorials to generations of nightmares. They 

 are wooden portraits of several types of mythical beings whom the 

 Iroquois say only a little while ago inhabited the far rocky regions at 

 the rim of the earth or wandered about in the forests. The Seneca 

 term for mask is "Face" (gag(^hsa') ; but the Onondaga more often 

 call him "Hunchback" (hadu' 'i', or hgdo* 'wi'(;^® while the Mohawk 

 are satisfied to use the term "Face" (gag\^''wara(; and so they are 

 called "False-faces" in the literature, and in "reservation English." 

 Iroquois hunters, when traveling, frequently met strange, quasihuman 

 beings who darted from tree to tree in the forests and who frequently 

 appeared to be disembodied heads with long, snapping hair. They 

 agreed not to molest human beings, saying that they merely wanted 

 Indian tobacco {Nicotiana rustica L.) and mush to be made from 

 the white corn meal which hunters and warriors carried. However, 

 the being with the wry mouth and broken nose, whom the Seneca call 

 "Great defender" (s'agodyowe'hgo'wa"), "The great humpbacked 

 one" (hadu'i' go* 'na*) of the Onondaga, has appeared to few human 



" For an elaboration of this method, see Sapir, E., Time perspective In aboriginal 

 American culture . . . Canada Geol. Sur., Mem. 90, Anthrop. Ser. No. 13, p. 51 ff., 

 Ottawa, 1916. 



" Phonetic note. — The orthography employed in this paper has the same phonetic values 

 as explained In Iroquois Suicide, Bur. Amer. Ethnol. BuU. 128, No. 14, 1941. 



