BeeLines - May 9, 2018
By Marybelle Beigh, Westfield Town & Village Historian
Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children - Remembering the late Ella Mabel Powers
Born Ella Mabel Powers, in 1872, in Hamburg NY, Mabel, as she was called, “was a woman both ahead of and behind her time,” wrote David Geary in the August 26, 2016 “Chautauquan Daily.” Her education included East Aurora High School, Buffalo State Normal School, and Shoemaker School of Elocution and Oratory. Geary continues, “A writer, lecturer, feminist, and pacifist, Powers was best known as an advocate for Native American history and culture, particularly of the Iroquois. From 1915 until her death in 1966, she appeared on various platforms at Chautauqua Institution more than 100 times.”
Mabel Powers’ “interest in Native American culture began in her childhood, and she made many Indian friends. By her 20s, she was publishing articles about the Indian way of life in newspapers and magazines. She also wrote extensively about women’s rights and world peace, but she had little success in getting that work [world peace] published.”
In an oft-repeated quote of hers from that time, she said in frustration, “If this is civilization, then let me be a savage.”
The event that led Powers to making “telling the stories of the Indians her life’s work” was when, in 1910, she was invited to participate in the Green Corn Ceremony on the Tonawanda Seneca Reservation at which she gave such a moving reading of “Hiawatha” for the Indian Council that they paid her the highest possible tribute of adoption into the tribe. Powers describes the event, “After holding a long council, the members of the Seneca Nation agreed that I should be called ‘Yesennohwehs’ (the One Who Carries and Tells the Stories).”
Later, she wrote, “I did not then think that I would ever do much speaking and writing for the Indians, but I have found so much valuable information for living, among the people by whom I was adopted, and from other Indian people, I am eager to pass on the knowledge to others that they may come to know the Indians as I have known them.” By 1915 she was fully into her role of telling stories she learned from the six Iroquois nations – Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Tuscarora, Cayuga, and Mohawk.
Mabel Powers (YEH SEN NOH WEHS) published her first book “Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children,” in 1917. (At the Book and Paper Show held by the Chautauqua County Historical Society this past weekend, I was delighted to find and purchase a first edition of this very book and curled up with it as my Sunday evening reading about how the Iroquois live in harmony with fairies, and legends of animals and humans in relation to each other and the Great Spirit – stories such as why the eagle defends Americans, why the hermit thrush is so shy, and so on.) The summer of that same year (1917), Powers gave her first lecture at Chautauqua.
Mabel Powers loved Chautauqua Lake, and spend most of her life around there, building a bungalow on the shore at Wahmeda, about a mile north of the Chautauqua Institution. Later she built a larger lodge where she began a tradition which continued through the rest of her life and well after – the Iroquois Fire Circle – a large fire started by rubbing two sticks together, and around which people gathered to sit and listen to the stories she told and the songs she sang. In later life, Powers lived on the grounds of Chautauqua in The Ramble, until her death in 1966.
Earlier in the 20th century, Powers traveled throughout the country, giving lectures on Native American culture, advocating for women’s rights, and promoting world peace. “In 1924 she was invited by Jane Addams to address the conference of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Washington.” It was also in 1924 that she published “The Portage Trail,” which is the history of how the Indians blazed a route from Lake Erie to Chautauqua Lake, and is told in Iroquois story form. In it she recorded the story of how the Seneca named Chautauqua Lake from the Iroquois words “rajah,” meaning fish, and “gadahgwah,” meaning taken out. So, the Seneca name, Jahdahgwah means “the place where the fish were taken out.” (Sorry folks! Chautauqua does NOT mean “bag tied in the middle.” The Indians didn’t have a way, like a balloon or airplane, to see what the whole lake looks like from way above).
The late Billie Dibble wrote a Dibble’s Dabbles for the June 17, 1982 Westfield Republican about “Mabel Powers charms with Indian stories.” In it she writes, “Some time after the death of Mabel Powers at the age of 94, many of her books, papers, and artifacts were given to the Patterson Library.” There are four boxes in the archive room containing many of Powers’ manuscripts, letters, newspaper clippings, photos, and other ephemera available for research, and a few of her books including “The Portage Trail,” “Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children,” “The Indian as Peacemaker,” and “Around an Iroquois Story Fire” are available for in-library reading in the History Room.
In her last lecture at Chautauqua, July 29, 1961, Powers shared, “We love the Indian because he brings to us the joy, freedom and peace of the waters, the beauty of the woodland, the power, poise and endurance of natural rhythmic motion, and most of all, the kinship and oneness of life.”