98 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



We already had a wealth of material for use in the field, and the 

 200 masks we had seen were beginning to bother our sleep. The data 

 included a selected series of criteria such as color, form of various 

 facial features, presence of supplementary wrinkles and spines on 

 the forehead, number of holes and method of attaching hair and head 

 bands, and such evidence of use as oiling, ceremonial tobacco bags, 

 and hints as to old carving techniques. Photographic prints were 

 mounted with the notes for field use. 



Informants regarded these pictures with mixed feelings. They 

 were at once interested, a little awed, and amused. Intentionally 

 horrific portraits are both awful and funny, and laughing relieves the 

 tension of fear. When a mask provides an excellent caricature of 

 some local personality, it becomes a great joke that so-and-so re- 

 sembles a False-face, and a friend passing on the road is hailed in to 

 share it. Chauncey Johnny John, of Coldspring, and James Crow, 

 of Newtown, mask makers to the Seneca for a generation, segregated 

 the pictures into a dozen mask types based on the most variable 

 feature, the shape of the mouth. This feature plus the general 

 treatment of carving frequently enables an informed Iroquois to name 

 the local group and often the maker of the mask. The most char- 

 acteristic masks from the Senecas of Newtown on Cattaraugus Reser- 

 vation vary between "spoon-mouthed'' and "straight-lipped," with 

 smooth facial features broken up by a row of spines above the nose 

 dividing wrinkled brows (fig. 95). Masks from the Onondaga of 

 Grand River are more massive and have bent noses and crooked 

 mouths augmented by many supplementary wrinkles (fig. 96). 



Observation coupled with photography is particularly rewarding 

 in studies of material culture, of which mask making is a good ex- 

 ample. At Coldspring, Chauncey Johnny John undertook to make a 

 mask for me according to Seneca standards, and so I recorded the 

 steps commencing with a standing basswood tree, selected for straight- 

 ness, from which he took the block and carved the mask in a series 

 of stages of roughing out the face, hollowing the back with adz and 

 crooked knife, and drilling the perforations with a hot iron (fig. 97). 

 Anciently, masks were carved on the living basswood tree and cleaved 

 away with a tobacco invocation beseeching the tree for its life, after 

 which, it is said, the wound healed over. But now T carvers prefer old 

 pine barn beams. Similarly, we recorded the technique of manufactur- 

 ing a folded hickory bark rattle. 



"While I was at Grand River during August, Tom Harris finally 

 consented to demonstrate the carving of a crooked- face mask, although 

 he said that it is not quite right for people to watch because there is 



