Mohawk Myths

Question: Hey, do you know any good reference material for Iroquois mythology? I think about doing an Iroquois pantheon for Scion, but it seems the sources are pretty rare because much of that religion is lost. Greetings from good ol' Germany!

Hey, there, we're waving at you from the States!

While we did sadly lose a great deal of native American religion and culture when the European invasion rolled through the Americas, Iroquois mythology isn't as lost as all that. Much of it was preserved through oral retelling and later recorded in the written word, and there are people who continue to follow versions of those ancient beliefs today, although it's always uncertain how much it may have changed in the past few centuries since the introduction of Christianity and other European ideals.

The most major problem with trying to research Iroquois mythology - or any native American mythology, really - is that the majority of reference works are on "Native American Mythology" instead of focusing on any one group. Obviously that tends to make them less than a thorough overview, since these books are trying to cover a billion different religions in a single text, often with overgeneralizations based on outdated scholarship or misguided ideas of cultural similarity. It's the same problem that you'll run into with southern American religions, which are often presented as part of anthology-style reference works about the Aztec AND the Maya AND the Inca, but at least those cultures only have to fight two other squatters in the book for attention. Native American cultures have to compete against every ethnic group on the entire continent, and you never know how successful a general book like that is at providing useful information on any one culture until you do the slog-work of going through it.

But don't get discouraged, because there is stuff out there about Iroquois mythology and you can find it and enjoy it to your heart's content! A couple of the books I would start with include Alex Mogelon's The People of Many Faces and Anthony Wonderley's At the Font of the Marvelous, which are both good overviews of the Iroquois area's myths. Remember that Iroquois is itself an umbrella term for several nearby cultures as well, so you can find plenty of good material by zeroing in on some of them - for example, Arthur Parker's Seneca Myths and Folktales is a good source specific to the Seneca, who are a specific part of the Iroquois nation.

If you don't have access or funds to get hold of print books, you can find some older scholarship on Iroquois religion online, especially at Sacred Texts, which provides links to free copies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books on the subject. As always with old sources, take them with a grain of salt, since they're likely to be biased with the outdated perceptions and opinions of a bunch of old white Christians, but they can still contain some useful information, especially when they stop trying to analyze things and just tell stories so that you can make your own judgments.

I believe I know of at least one occasional visitor to our site who is also working on an Iroquois pantheon, so if he's around, hopefully he'll weigh in with what he's found most useful. :)