Today’s Six Nations folk regard the world with twenty-first-century minds, but not all of them believe that the Little People are completely folkloric. For a contemporary Iroquois, the experience of seeing them or their work is rare and awesome. It’s like what witnessing a UFO or a mystery monster would be for a typical white. The reason so few whites know the power of this tradition today is because so few Iroquois will talk about it in their presence.
In the 1950s, Edmund Wilson remarked upon the reluctance of the Iroquois to talk about their ancient mysticism. That goes double for the Little People, still among the most sacred and private traditions of the Six Nations. Do not ever press any Iroquoian about this subject. Some take it far more seriously than you could believe.
Late Allegany storyteller Duce Bowen was a friend of mine, and he wouldn’t say a word about the Little People with me. Even Michael Bastine won’t say everything he knows, especially about the Little People.
“I don’t own this knowledge,” he said years ago—before I got it—when I pushed him too hard on a certain point. “Even though I happen to have it, it’s not my property to give away.” Maybe this was the reason the Celtic Druids didn’t set their wisdom to writing: It was meant to be kept for those to whom it was sacred and shared with only those who were ready. Or maybe the Little People could be listening. We aren’t publishing anything that wasn’t published before, or anything even remotely off-limits that wasn’t told to us by whites.
I started my publishing career writing about the supernatural history of western New York. As a ghost-story collector, I have interviewed thousands of people about their sightings. One of the most interesting patterns that comes up across New York state is how often the whites see the Little People, reporting them first as ghosts.
White Little People reports come in a few styles:
Site-specific encounters. New York’s ancient site tradition has been lost. There are probably sites and regions all over the state once associated with the Native American fairies. Most of the Little People places anyone remembers are on reservations. Whites who visit these areas sometimes report seeing them.
The imaginary friend. Many American children report conversations and encounters with beings no one else can see. The syndrome of this “imaginary friend” is well known to psychology. (Sometimes the classification is expansive enough to include personified toys, but this seems to be pushing it.) Some of these encounters are mere sightings, but sustaining relationships do develop. Typically the phantom pals these children see are their own size or smaller. Some of them in upstate New York sound just like the Little People of Iroquois folklore.
Ghosts. When I interview an eyewitness about an apparition, I ask a lot of questions, including specifics of the visual qualities. When I come to the size, a very few witnesses do a double take to remember that the apparition was unnaturally small. Sounds like they had been seeing Little People. Little wonder in Iroquois territory.
Everywhere they exist in world tradition, the Little People have three general traits:
They have a connection to nature. They are of the woods, lakes, and hills. They move easily among the animals and speak to them in their languages. They guard and honor special places in the world. They help the seasonal cycles and other processes of nature.
They are associated with the human dead. It’s not as if they are the ancestors in any world tradition, or that the spirits of our dead go to join them. It’s more as if the fairies and the dead share the same indefinite realm where they occasionally cross paths. The otherworld, apparently, is big and indistinct enough for both of them.
They have a special interest in human children. They come to children, they protect children, and sometimes they take children away.
THREE NATIONS
The invisible Little People, called the Jo-ga-oh by the Seneca, are nicknamed the Jungies today on many reservations. They were thought to live in three tribes, whose names in Seneca were the Ohdowas, the Gahonga, and the Gandayah. Each tribe has its own role in the world, so distinct that the attempt has even been made to place them into European categories such as gnomes, elves, and fairies (which are not absolute and settled terms even in the world that gave them birth). Each Iroquois language has different names for the tribes, but other essentials seem to hold. We know them best from the Seneca tales preserved by Harriet Maxwell Converse (1836–1903) and Arthur C. Parker.
The Hunters
We don’t see them much anymore, “The People of the Underground Shadows,” “The Hunters,” or “The Little Folk of the Darkness.” These Ohdowas (in Seneca) are mighty, kindly sprites who carry out the will of the Good-Minded Spirit. Their territories are the sunless realms under the earth. They are the doorkeepers of hell.
Were the underworld a concentration camp, these Hunters would be its guards, watching the passages to the upper world and keeping down the monsters penned there by the Good-Minded Spirit. They are especially on guard against the Great White Buffalo. Not much would be left of the upper world if these chaos beasts were running loose.
When the stampede is on, the shadow hunters thin the herd. When one of the creatures breaks into the daylight, the sunlight elves send up a red cloud as an alarm, and the Hunters take up the chase above ground. To the old Iroquois, such an inspiring, discordant sky was a sign of the Little People on the job.
The underworld has once-earthly prisoners, too, ones who transgressed against the natural order: stinging, slithering, and venomous critters; cats who kill more than they can eat; witches or wizards in animal forms—all rounded up by the Hunters. It’s their role to know that their proper places are here, but many still hope to break out. There they would poison springs, blight
