Onondaga

This tale returns us to masks, now not that of Southwestern Tewa Laughing Warrior Girl but the origin of the Northeastern "False Faces," complexly important in many Irquoian ceremonies. (The league of the Iroquois, constituted of the related tribes named in the story, was one of the most powerful forces in North American politics and warfare from the mid-sixteenth century until the American Revolution.) This story of the evolution of a form of visual artistry is self-reflexive about the importance of storytelling. The "conclusion" of the narrative is the story told by the young hunter become old giant, the story we have just heard. It tells of his learning a marvelous art honoring the animals who are descendants of the ancestors of humans, as well as the trees of the great forests that originally covered all the Iroquoian lands. The narrative thus displays how American Indians imagined their cultures as embodying, as well as embodied in, the ever-ongoing processes of their natural environment. Terrifying "historical" giants threatening the existence of their great political confederacy become "myth giants" from whom the Indians have learned the art by which they affirm their union with the world of plants and animals. The art of carving and the art of telling of it manifest the consciousness which enables them to establish the uniquenss of their human culture as an integral element of the natual world.

This story offers a form of narrative movement that without relying on suspense is counterposed to the narrative rhetoric of repetition. The pleasure of hearing is like the pleasure of watching the flow of a river. Nothing is static - the hospitable giants become the ferocious and invulnerable destroyers, self-destroyed by the Upholder who becomes their leader to crush their stony skins and frozen hearts in an avalanche of rocks. In his loneliness the one escapee develops into a terrific destroyer of the natural world - only to redirect his power by transforming a young killer of animals into a patient, quiet learner of the language of the trees and of the uniquely human skill to honor with carven images the animals he had hunted. Nothing better illustrates how different the Indian conception of art is from our own than this praise of carving alone within a vast forest images in the living wood of a basswood tree, whose porous fibers welcome the sunlight entering its darkness. Indian art engages rather than separating artist and audience from the specific qualities of their sensory environment. This art sustains and makes stronger, even while it grows older, a culture that is the most complex achievement of natural life.

Onondaga Nation

MOHAWK * ONEIDA * ONONDAGA * CAYUGA * SENECA * TUSCARORA