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Seneca Creation Story Introduction by Wallace Chafe One of the great classics of Iroquois oral literature is an account of how the world came to be as it is—the origin of the most salient components of traditional Iroquois life, analogous in some ways to the Genesis story in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As with many other oral traditions, transmission of this creation story from one generation to the next declined during the twentieth century, but at the end of the nineteenth century the story was still known and recited by a number of people in the various Iroquois nations and languages. Fortunately, in the latter part of the nineteenth century several versions were recorded by J. N. B. Hewitt, an ethnologist and linguist (we might now call him a linguistic anthropologist ), who was employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology (the bae) of the Smithsonian Institution. John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt was born in 1859 near theTuscarora Reservation in western New York. His father was of European ancestry, but his mother was part Tuscarora. Although Hewitt’s native language was English, he is said to have learned something of the Tuscarora language from friends at school. He planned at first to become a physician like his father, but his future was completely changed in 1880 when he met Erminnie Smith, a many-talented woman from Jersey City who was then collecting materials on the Iroquois languages for the bae. Smith invited Hewitt to be her assistant, and after her death in 1886 he was hired by the bae to continue her work. He remained an employee of that agency for fifty-one years, until his death in 1937. Hewitt recorded an impressive amount of material on Iroquois customs and languages. An obituary mentions about four thousand manuscript pages of notes on Onondaga, eight hundred pages each on Tuscarora and Seneca, and two hundred pages on Cayuga, plus about six thousand pages on miscellaneous related topics.1 He also left behind thousands of file slips that he had prepared for a Tuscarora dictionary. They were recently edited, expanded, and published by Blair Rudes.2 Hewitt is said to have been a perfectionist, a trait that may have kept him from publishing more of his materials than he did. Early in his career he ventured 516 seneca into linguistic theory with an article on Indian language morphology in which he criticized the views of Daniel Brinton on the nature of polysynthesis.3 For this presumption he was scathingly attacked by Brinton, a leading figure in the anthropology of the time.4 This unpleasant exchange may have discouraged Hewitt from ever again expressing in print his ideas concerning the general nature of the languages of which he had such a deep firsthand knowledge. He recorded five versions of the Iroquois creation story between 1889 and 1900. Three of them—one in Onondaga, one in Seneca, and one in Mohawk—were published in 1903.5 Another, longer Onondaga version appeared in 1928.6 The translation here is of the Seneca version, which was dictated to Hewitt in 1896 by John Armstrong, ‘‘an intelligent and conscientious annalist’’ who lived on the Cattaraugus Reservation in western New York. It was subsequently revised for publication with the help of Andrew John, a Seneca who visited Hewitt in Washington . This Seneca version is very different from the Onondaga and Mohawk versions that were included with it in the 1903 volume. For one thing, it is less than half as long. The others begin with a complex series of events in the world above the sky, events that precede and lead up to the expulsion from that world of the woman who goes on to establish life on earth. The Seneca version omits almost all of that, beginning directly with the jealousy of the chief who then causes the woman’s fall from the sky. The Onondaga and Mohawk versions also include various subsequent episodes that are lacking in the Seneca, for example, the animals’ repeated diving for mud to place on the turtle’s back (the widespread earth-diver motif), the origin of the primal False Face, and the freeing of the sun from a snare. It gives almost no attention to the activities of the second twin, such as his creation of illformed beings that contrast with the well-formed creations of the first twin. The formation of hills and rivers is only briefly alluded to at the very end, seemingly as an afterthought. On...

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