IROQUOIAN COSMOLOGY 



SECOND PAHT 



WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES" 



By J. N. B. Hf:witt 



INTRODUCTION 



The accompanying text was recorded in 1900, on the Grand River 

 Reservation of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, from the dictation of 

 the Seneca Federal chief, John Arthur Gibson, who was in addition 

 a priest of the religion of his ancestors. At the time the record 

 was made he had been completely blind for 26 years. The text was 

 recorded partly by hand and partly by the typewriter. It is one of 

 the longest known texts dealing with the myths of the genesis, the 

 cosmic metamorphoses, of primitive Iroquois thinking. Naturally 

 there are varying versions of the several incidents related in the text; 

 but in the main events of the myth the several variants agree. The 

 subject matter of the text is the phenomena of the environment of 

 the ancestors of the Iroquois. It is not strange after contact with 

 European explorers and missionaries for over 300 years that the 

 text would have some foreign elements; but these are readily de- 

 tected because of the difference in the psychologic premises of the 

 Amerindian and the European peoples. It is due the memory of 

 Mr. Gibson to say that his viewpoint was dominantlj' that of his 

 ancestoi's. 



At the close of the Revolutionary War in America the tribes of the 

 Iroquois which had espoused the cause of Great Britain removed to 

 lands assigned them by the Crown of Great Britain in the Province 

 of Ontario. With the exception of the Mohawk tribe, all the other 

 tribes were divided into at least two parts, and one of these parts of 

 each several tribe remained within the State of New York. Natu- 

 rally such a disruption of tribal and social organizations led to a 

 period of confusion. Many of tlie leaders, both in civil and military 

 affairs, had lost their lives in that wai'. The chiefs of the portion of 

 the Onondaga tribe which removed to Canada were the first to take 

 measures for establishing the Federal and other tribal organizations 

 among their people who had taken up their residence in the Dominion 

 of Canada. One of these, who was a very old man when Mr. Gib- 

 son was first installed as a Federal chief, noted that Mr. Gibson 



<» Tho first part was published in the TweEty-first .\nDual Report of the Bureau of .\nierican 

 Ethnology. • 



453 



