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The Three Sisters

Clans of the Iroquois

Iroquois Women and Agriculture

Iroquois Oral Tradition

False Faces Healing Ritual (The Longhouse People, movie, 1951)

The People of the Longhouse

Traditional Agricultural Practices

 Also called Midwinter Ceremony, or New Year’s Ceremony, it closed traditionally the annual cycle of the old year and the beginning of the new. It was performed during a nine-days period and was the most important of the Iroquois seasonal ceremonies. The time of the celebration was around the winter solstice, but anciently it was determined through a series of astronomical observations. The main focus was represented by the constellation of the Pleiades, a group of stars dominating the night sky during the winter season and culminating just in the middle of winter. Then the moon was observed, to establish the first new moon following the zenith of the Pleiades, then other five elapsed and the beginning of the ceremony was determined.
Two heralds, called “uncles”, each belonging to one of the two matrilinear moieties in which every community was subdivided, announced the beginning of the New Year making the circuit of the houses. The first ritual act was the stirring of the ashes in the east and west fires of the “long house”, the building utilized for the ceremonial activities, using a special maple wood paddle. This performance, accompanied with singing, prayers and thanks, symbolized the renewing of the fire and the official opening of the New Year’s festivities. The latter comprised a great quantity of procedures , formulas, songs and dances. Among them there was a Dream Guessing Rite, during which people tried to guess some persistent dream which harassed some persons and to satisfy the person’s desires, in order to alleviate symptoms and cure afflicted minds. Other practices included thanksgiving prayers to the Creator, tobacco offerings, songs and dances  honoring the Three Sisters, the food plants (maize, beans and squash).
Among the most important personages of the ceremony, the False Faces were masked individuals impersonating the spirits of the woodland. The ceremonies involving these masks consisted in offering of tobacco, with which these wild beings were pacified and were asked to dispel the diseases afflicting people, cattle and crops. These ritual actions combined therapeutic rituals, performed on behalf of individual patients into their homes, with ceremonial practices aimed at propitiating a good harvest and protecting the cultivated fields for the whole community. The power of the masks was regarded as an important device to remove and defeat witchcraft, a continuous danger for the life and wellbeing of the community (Hirschfelder-Molin 1992).