In the early hours of March 29, 1911, a fire started. By four in the morning, a full wing of the library was a howling inferno. Crowds gathered in the streets around it, yipping and dancing like children, catching the flecks of once-precious manuscripts that soared out of the building like the snowflake of hell. It’s lucky the whole structure wasn’t lost.
Genealogists and researchers have never forgotten this event, certainly the greatest disaster that has ever befallen New York state’s library system. It’s one reason that many a passionate query into the past hits a brick wall at 1911. Lost with these records was most of a vast collection of Native American objects and artifacts. The most sacred, though, including the displays of medicine masks, were entirely untouched by the catastrophe.
The most popular explanation for the museum fire was faulty wiring. The second was the idea that a smoldering cigar butt had been tossed into a wastebasket. But the Iroquois never doubted that the conflagration’s real source was the shameful treatment of the medicine masks in the collection. You don’t do that to a Doorkeeper, to a Great Doctor. It was as if the masks had lashed out at everything around them and left themselves standing as a message—if the white world could read it. Not a hair on one of them was even singed. Can you imagine entering the smoking wreck of the library and seeing a set of them staring at you? This building today is one of Albany’s most famous haunted sites.
We hear through the grapevine that two Buffalo museums still have masks not on display. The same source also tells us that they have arrangements with the local Seneca concerning the fair treatment of these masks. Members of the False Face Society are invited to each museum off-hours for behind-the-scenes ceremonies. Doubtless the museum folks see this arrangement as a gesture of respect to their reservation friends. The service rendered could go both ways, and the medicine people doubtless chuckle when they think of it. Both museums are haunted, by the way, and accustomed to frequent flare-ups when new Native American displays come in or old ones are moved.
The Will of the Masks
Ted Williams tells us about an incident from the 1990s. Word got out that a handful of masks in the possession of one upstate museum were to be returned to the Oneida. A representative of the Onondaga Longhouse went to the museum to see if the rumor was true. He also asked to visit with the masks in question and work a ceremony for them.
He was brought to a room in which six masks hung on a wall. He commenced a tobacco burning ceremony, and almost instantaneously the door at the back of the room flew open. No human was in sight who could have given it that kind of a shove, and the curator leaped forward to close it. The Onondaga healer, though, had gotten a look at what was behind this: Over a hundred masks not destined to be returned were being stored—“imprisoned,” Ted calls it—in this room. They wanted to be part of the ceremony, too. He called to the curator not to bother with the door. “I’ll tell you why later.”
When the ceremony was over, the healer told the curator a few things about False Faces. One thing the Onondaga man did not mention was that he had received a vision at the end of the ceremony. As he was leaving, he ducked his head just inside the room that held the hundred masks and said to them in Onondaga, “You’ll be coming home, too, within two years.” It was so.
TWO HEALERS AND THE MASKS
Among the wonders in Mad Bear’s cabin was his personal False Face. Usually it hung on a wall, its gnarled lips, nose, cheeks, and chin in plain view. White author Doug Boyd had learned great respect for Iroquois belief, but he admitted in his book on Mad Bear that it was hard to accept that this or any other mask was, in any sense, a living thing. Yet over the years of his acquaintance with Mad Bear, Boyd could swear that its “hair”—the yellow, wispy fibers hanging from it—dipped closer to the floor at every visit. Even its grin seemed to broaden.
Many a time there were several False Faces in Mad Bear’s house, most of them on loan. Mad Bear was a culture keeper. Even people uneasy with him trusted him more than their own families to care for objects of cultural significance. It made for some turbulent nights. These masks interacted with each other like magnets. Sometimes they got restive, tossing small objects around and buzzing as if they were conversing.
To Mad Bear, the understanding that these things were energized and even filled with human sentiments was fundamental. He cautioned his human guests to behave well around them. “Don’t treat them with any less respect than you’d give to another person I introduced you to,” he said. “Don’t laugh at them or mock them. Don’t even point at them. If you get something stirred up out of one of them, I don’t have the power to turn it around.”
One morning, Mike Bastine came for a visit and found Mad Bear bleary-eyed. “Bear, you look awful. You been up all night?”
“Mike, you should have heard it,” said the healer. “The masks were really acting up. I had to get up and do a ceremony to calm them down. Took forever. Boy, I wonder what was going on in the world last night. Guess we’ll find out pretty soon.” The house still smelled like tobacco and sage.
A few years before his death, Mad Bear got sick and went off for traditional healing. He loaned two masks to Michael for safekeeping. This was a gesture of respect in both directions. “I told them where they were going,” he said to
