30 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. Ill 



that have been sustained during lacrosse matches in their twenties 

 and thirties, and sooner or later they affect a staff when traveling the 

 roads and woodland paths. Simeon Gibson in his fifties always carried 

 a stick, one of several that he picked up from beside the gate, another 

 that he left at the store where he traded, or that he cut along a fence 

 row, or retrieved from the roadside where he had cast it for a passing 

 ride. This is hardly an individual trait. 



Rather the staff is deeply rooted in the Iroquois conception of the 

 ideal older man. "Old man" has a connotation of affection and 

 respect. Certain classes of supernaturals are called "Our grand- 

 fathers." This is how the people address, in prayers, both classes of 

 maskers, the wooden faces whom the people impersonate by wearing 

 masks of wood and the Husk-faces; both carry wooden staves. The 

 masked members of the False-face Society and the Husk-faces com- 

 mand great respect. In praying to the tutelaries whom they represent, 

 the priest says: "And now your cane receives tobacco, which is a 

 great hickory with its limbs stripped off to the top." 



All the actors in the ceremony carry peeled staves of hickory of 

 about their own height. Likewise, the Husk-faces individually carry 

 staffs or shorter canes which they dance around. It is presumed that 

 such impersonations of the grandfathers, these masked shamans, 

 project stereotypes of statuses and roles that obtained in former times. 



The implement of a chief. — Likewise a cane is the implement of 

 the chief. Chief ship is the highest status in Iroquois society. In 

 becoming a federal chief, one who is destined to serve as an officer 

 of the League, a man gives up the right to follow the war path and 

 puts behind him the glory of individual achievement ; henceforth his 

 life is tied up with the affairs of the council and his business is peace. 

 This honor seldom befalls a man before his middle years, when it 

 is natural that he should lay aside the war club and take up a staff. 

 The symbolism is fortified, moreover, by the fact that each federal 

 chief has a subchief or deputy who acts as his messenger and some- 

 times his speaker, and this functionary is sometimes referred to as 

 "The Cane" or "The Ear, who sits on the roots of the Tree," the 

 chieftain whose subchief he is (Hewitt, 1920, p. 535). A cane figures 

 as a status symbol of chiefship in that section of the Deganawi'dah 

 legend that treats of condoling and installing federal chiefs in 

 office. Therefore, the so-called Chief's canes that occur in ethno- 

 logical collections from the Iroquois do not represent necessarily a 

 recent development in woodcarving which followed new tools. The 

 cane idea is old ; the specimens are of the recent historic period. 



Other Condolence canes. — The carved cane is a new idea which 



