Ethnologist William Beauchamp considered the Great Flying Heads a very likely source for the ghastly, disembodied visages these miracle masks personify. These heads could be the most dreadful bogies in the Iroquois metaphysical zoo, but they did good turns now and then for individual humans. They were also size-shifters. They could make themselves as small as a human head so as to float through a longhouse portal. In that circumstance, they would look a lot like medicine masks.
The caste system for the Iroquois masks need not be presumed to be set in stone. We hear that the oldest and grandest of the common face masks, seasoned with generations of ceremonies, are as esteemed as the Great Doctors or Doorkeepers.
Still, the common faces come in many untraditional forms. Seemingly answering to the changes in American society, some recently made masks have taken the form of pigs. Doubtless a new category of mask had to be made for consultants and career politicians.
OPENING THE EYES
But it isn’t just the healers who are the subjects of reverence. A sense of awe and respect attaches to the tools of their trade, the masks them elves, that may be hard to understand for people outside Iroquois society. This is a subject of its own.
Orenda, the universal force of existence, gives the False Face masks a power unique among man-made objects. To many Iroquois, the greatest of these masks are alive. They occasionally wake. If you or someone you know has one of these, you better keep reading.
For the old-timers, no classification was more significant than that between a mask that has been used in ceremonies and one that has not. The masks that have been sold to tourists over the years are most often mere works of craftsmanship, wrought like the items in shop class. They have never been consecrated by ritual use, so there ought to be little sacrilege in selling them. While some contemporary traditionalists are starting to maintain that a medicine mask of any sort is holy and sacred, they are surely far less sensitive about manufactured False Faces.
Masks used in ceremonies are totally different. They are charged. Their “eyes have been opened.” Those that have been used in generations of ceremonies have been invested with ever more of the force of orenda. They are, in their own sense, alive.
Traditionalists believe that these masks have to be handled with the respect and attention given to living things, even “fed” and continually revivified like biological beings. They pine for the community of ceremonies. They hunger for corn soup, itch for sunflower oil, and pant for the smoke of sacred tobacco. They can be pretty hot to hold.
To use any mask irreverently might curse the bearer, or whoever he or she looked at while wearing it. Most Six Nations’ folk drape these False Faces when they are not in use, which minimizes the risk of riling one of them up. Masks shouldn’t be left face upward, either, since this is a sign of death. The power of the mask might take the pose too seriously and start to inflict the real thing on people and pets in the home around it.
MASKS AND MUSEUMS
Every Iroquois nation keeps a store of medicine masks, to which many of the ones held in white museums are returning. The Onondaga are generally considered the specialists on the handling and repatriation of the medicine masks.
The worst imaginable environment for these masks is the one in which most twentieth-century whites encountered them: a display in a museum. To let one of these powerful objects with its own inconceivable form of life gain dust, crack, and dry in a glass pen may be as senseless and cruel as to put a lion in a cage. Do these objects live and hold consciousness in a direct sense? Do they simply project the appearance of awareness, having acquired some of the energy of the nation of their makers? These are questions that will never be answered with certainty.
Ted Williams reminded us that many of the masks in these upstate New York museums were questionably acquired, which could not have sweetened their temperaments. Some of the Native Americans who ended up selling the masks had no business making decisions with objects of national significance. And other masks were obtained by non–Native Americans in divorces and inheritances and sold from there.
The masks, though, at least the live ones, keep their power. Masks “caged” in museums get restless and agitated, cracking the glass in their displays and creating other problems. They act up, moving about during the night, trading places with other masks, making their distinctive, disconcerting whistle calls or causing poltergeist activity around them. Many a museum curator, they say, has been driven to an early retirement by these active masks. And they are known to play some part in their own destinies.
The Library Fire
In the early twentieth century, the New York State Library was housed on the fourth floor of the state capitol building in Albany. It was the fifth largest libraryin the United States and one of the twenty biggest in the world. It doubled as the state archives, holding a priceless collection of books, manuscripts, documents, and records going back to the days when New York was called New Netherland. It also held a trove of Native American artifacts, including some much-mistreated Iroquois medicine masks.
At that point in time, most of those masks had to be live ones. They quite likely dated back a century or more and had been used many times in ceremonies. Some may even have been taken as the spoils of conquest. They had been mounted behind glass display cases and untouched for decades. They itched under the dust that gathered on them and were offended by the gawking visitors.
The library had grown too big, and plans were made to move it by January 1911 to a larger facility. But there were delays in the construction
