100 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



a belief that the carver may cut himself. Nevertheless. Harris is 

 master of his tools and his strokes are sure so that within a few 

 hours he had turned out two representative stages of the hadu'T mask 

 for the National Museum (fig. 98). 



Not only did my Seneca friends assist me in photographing their 

 masks, but they readily posed themselves in the crucial stages of the 

 masked rituals. Before long I was requested to help buy meat — a pig 

 head and side pork that has supplanted bear meat in feasts — to help 

 my interpreter's sister sponsor the rare ceremony of "They are cutting 

 through the forests," hadi'hadi'ya's, to renew her membership in 

 the Medicine Company. This ceremony, which is first mentioned by 

 Jesuit missionaries among the Huron, is still kept up by the various 

 lodges of the Iroquois Medicine Company. Giant Raven, the messen- 

 ger of the Society, had in a dream descended on the roof of the 

 sponsor's city home, and a clairvoyant had divined that this ceremony 

 would help her. So she distributed a sacred eight kernels of corn to 

 the Raven of her four clans, who transferred half to the Raven of 

 the cousin clans. The whole responsibility for conducting the cere- 

 mony rests with the latter, who leads his gourd-shaking singers in 

 through the woods from a neighboring house, and they enter and 

 sit down across the fire from the brother clans of the sponsor (fig. 99) . 

 This dual division permeates the whole ritual from mutual greet- 

 ings, the tobacco-burning invocation to the supernaturals, tossing 

 songs across the fire, passing the berry juice between periods, curing 

 the sponsor, the round dance, the masker's entrance, to the terminal 

 feast. Thanks to Hiram \Yatt and Chauncey Johnny John, the 

 Ravens, my friend Richard Congdon of Salamanca, who helped 

 with the photographs, and Sherman and Clara Redeye, my inter- 

 preters, our files contain a complete record of the performance. 



Smithsonian exploration and field work has become almost a tra- 

 dition among the Six Nations near Brantford on Grand River. Once 

 more we reaped the benefits of Mr. Hewitt's fine relations with the 

 Indians and Canadian government officials. To Maj. E. P. Randle, 

 Superintendent of the Six Nations, and Chief Clerk Hilton Hill 

 (fig. 100) we acknowledge the fine facilities of a schoolroom study and 

 teacher's residence among the Lower Cayuga. Here, throughout 

 August our family was part of the Iroquois community while Simeon 

 Gibson patiently outlined the yearly cycle of ceremonies at Onondaga 

 longhouse and dictated the principal texts which make up the 9-day 

 Midwinter Festival of dream fulfillment at the Indian new year. These 

 ceremonies involve some vexing problems of social organization — 

 the existence of village bands, the function of moieties, the nature of 

 residence after marriage, and the sorrorate. 



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