386 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 191 



Fear of the carvings, of seeing them or touching them, seems 

 to be confined to a few of the younger women. The wife of Allison 

 Thomas is said to be afraid to be alone in the community house; she 

 thinks she hears the masks talking at night and believes they were 

 the cause of a blizzard that occurred one winter. Several of the 

 other women called the masks "nightmares" and "scary," but in these 

 instances I felt they were reacting less as Indians to the symbolic 

 content than as women to the grotesque appearance of the carvings. ^^ 

 The older women take the masks for granted as do the men, who show 

 no overt signs of fear or caution when they are near them. They 

 handle the carvings, even those which have been "doctored," with 

 familiarity and, what is more significant, allowed me to do the same. 



Along with the probability that faith in the spiritual powers of the 

 false faces is no longer complete and unquestioning, there are obvious 

 indications that some of the practices and professed beliefs have 

 been recently acquired, or at least reinforced, from the outside. Most 

 of the members of the medicine society, and particularly the carvers, 

 have access to the literature on Iroquois masks and rituals through 

 Pete Hest. Their interest in and knowledge of these ethnographic 

 works came out many times in the course of interviews. One man told 

 me that although today at Onondaga the masks are called hodo'm, the 

 real name is gagohsa (the Seneca term) , and that he knew this was cor- 

 rect because he had seen it somewhere in a book. Another, in trying to 

 explain that the Onondaga do not classify their masks according to 

 Doctor, Doorkeeper, Beggar, and Dancing, as do the Seneca, read the 

 information from a pamphlet by Beauchamp. The illustrations in 

 Wissler's "Lore of the Demon Mask" and Speck's "Iroquois" were 

 cited as a source of inspiration to the carvers when they are in need of 

 "new ideas." 



Dependence on the literature is coupled with a tendency to look to 

 Pete Hest for the correct forms of behavior. It is he who has told the 

 men that they should continue to carve masks, that they should keep 

 all they make, that they should not aUow the Whites to profane them 

 by photographing them. His role in the medicine society is quite 

 definitely that of expert and teacher. Under his guidance about 10 of 

 the members gather at the community center on winter nights. Here 

 in the room where the masks are hung they eat corn soup, learn the 

 traditional songs from the older men, and study "Indian lore." 

 Although his injunctions to observe the ancient customs are not 

 always obeyed, his knowledge of them commands much respect, for I 

 was repeatedly referred to him as the authority on masks and as the one 

 person who could tell me everything I wanted to know. To what 



2' Women In our cultiue to whom I showed pictures of Iroquois masks reacted in much the same way 

 and used almost Identical words — "hideous," "frightening," etc. 



