The Stikini, a Witch-Owl Shapeshifter, Is a Seminole Myth That Still Evokes Fear

When my grandma speaks, I cling onto her phrases with a burning curiosity. Her voice, thick with a lilting twang that might solely come from a tried-and-true Oklahoman, wraps round my earliest recollections. Sidling as much as her on the sofa as she did her make-up within the mornings, I’d anticipate tales of my great-grandfather, or classes in our Native language, Mvskoke (Muscogee Creek), spoken by our tribe the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Even now, at 22 years outdated, grandma’s tales really feel like pooling water in my arms, one thing treasured I have to protect.

After I first started an editorial fellowship with Audubon final winter, she requested if I’d heard concerning the Stikini, the owl-transforming shapeshifter in Seminole fable that’s able to hiding in plain sight and sowing woe. In our language, the phrase Stikini comes from Estek’ené (ih-stih-kin-ee), which interprets to Nice Horned Owl, and I’d by no means heard of it. She then proceeded to inform me about as soon as encountering these creatures. An ominous tone took over as she pulled me into her reminiscence of 1 night time within the late Nineteen Nineties, when my dad was simply a youngster.

As she remembers it, my father had simply gained a giant highschool basketball recreation, and afterward he went celebrating with associates, leaving my grandma to drive the automotive dwelling. On a darkish and empty again street, a participant from the opposing crew raced up alongside her and glared into the driving force’s window—a transparent try and intimidate my father—solely to understand my grandma was alone. The automotive and its vibrant headlights rapidly peeled off, however not earlier than leaving her badly shaken. Arriving at their home, she remembers being met by 4 small circles hovering within the air, gleaming yellow and tinged pink within the headlights. Steadily coming into focus, the orbs materialized into two massive owls, looming like shadows come to life as they stared at her. 

Worry settled into grandma’s abdomen. Owls may imply just one factor: Somebody was sending her a warning. Ideas started to swirl in her head as she realized one thing terrible may have occurred if my dad had been the one within the automotive as an alternative. The owls ultimately took flight, leaving in peace, however the night time has at all times caught together with her. She believed, and nonetheless does, that the owls have been Stikini bearing a message. “Owls are checked out as evil beings,” my grandma says about that night time. “Whereas I don’t actually observe all the standard methods, I respect them. I really feel that owls are dangerous omens.”

According to our tradition’s beliefs, witches and medication individuals with robust non secular talents are the one ones able to remodeling into the Stikini—and in true horror-movie style, the transformation is kind of grotesque. To take the type of an owl, they have to go to a secluded spot within the woods and expel their internal organs to make themselves malleable sufficient to shift from human to animal. The late Indigenous artist Kelly Haney (Seminole, Muscogee Creek) captured the method—put up vomiting, fortunately—in his portray The Transformation, which contains a man with the pinnacle of an owl kneeling behind a stump. As soon as remodeled, the beings, which characterize exacted revenge, will search out people to steal and eat their hearts. It’s not unusual for an unexplained loss of life or bother inside a tribal neighborhood to be chalked as much as a go to from the Stikini.  

Quickly after my grandma shared this reminiscence, I started researching this fable for my very own cultural data and a possible story for the journal. It did not take me lengthy to understand reporting the piece could be tougher than I spotted—and the way significantly my individuals take this terrifying creature.

Over the course of a number of weeks, I contacted three totally different individuals from my neighborhood to interview, with two by no means responding and one other ghosting me after agreeing to speak. I stop making an attempt out of respect for his or her beliefs, however trying again, I ought to’ve anticipated these reporting challenges. After I informed my nice aunt Sheila Little-Harjo, assistant chief of the tribe, that I used to be going to jot down concerning the Stikini, she warned me that individuals have been unlikely to broach the subject in any respect—the story holds that a lot energy over our individuals. “It’s one thing that may at all times be a difficulty,” she informed me. “Particularly with those who’re actually conventional.”

While the Stikini fable is strictly a Seminole story, my individuals aren’t distinctive with regards to their difficult relationship with owls. Throughout Indigenous communities, owls are sometimes seen as dangerous omens and symbols of loss of life. For the Diné, often known as the Navajo, owls are generally seen as harbingers of loss of life. To see an owl is an indication to arrange for loss locally, household, and even one’s personal demise. Different Indigenous cultures just like the Ojibwe and the Inuit affiliate owls with the useless however in a extra optimistic gentle, believing they’re returning spirits or intermediaries for medication individuals. 

Conscious of Utah’s massive Diné inhabitants, a couple of years in the past the Tracy Aviary Middle in Salt Lake Metropolis started internet hosting Indigenous cultural programming, together with academic sources and Native naming round their birds and lands.  As a part of this work, Indigenous staff from the middle wrote a three-part series of blog posts sharing their views on owls and Indigenous beliefs in conservation. Daniel Hernandez, who served because the group’s inaugural director of tradition from 2022 to 2024,  wrote one of many blogs underneath his pen title Arcia Tecun, 

Hernandez is Winak, a diasporic Mayan residing in the US. Rising up in Utah round many Diné and dealing in New Zealand’s Māori neighborhood as an grownup, Hernandez grew interested by cross-cultural interpretations of owls as he noticed how they appeared within the beliefs of Indigenous teams all over the world. As he started working with guests to the Tracy Aviary, he remembers encountering combined opinions towards the birds. On excursions the place Hernandez would supply Indigenous classes, he would give ample warnings of the owl enclosure on the premises, and a few Native guests refusing to even go close to them.

“I obtained totally different views,” Hernandez says of visitor’s assorted reactions of the owls, from fearful to virtually accepting. “I believe for some individuals, they’d be like, ‘Who’s gonna die within the household?’ After which for others, they have been like, ‘Oh, thanks for the warning.’ So it was actually fascinating to see that, as a result of I felt prefer it represented their totally different relationships with loss of life.”

Indigenous representations of owls in in style tradition can even mirror this fraught relationship. Sterlin Harjo (Seminole, Muscogee Creek) and Taika Waitii’s (Māori) present, Reservation Canine, which depicts the lives of Indigenous teenagers on an Oklahoma reservation, is a current notable instance. The present options owls in a number of episodes with their eyes blurred out to maintain Indigenous viewers from having to look straight at them, and one recurring character retains owl statues outside of his house to keep at bay friends as a part of his hermit life-style.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon, in the meantime, makes use of an owl to alert the movie’s Osage characters of a coming loss of life within the household. And over on the AMC present Darkish Winds, which follows fictional tribal police on a Navajo reservation, owl feathers are depicted as instruments for darkish magic by medication males—one thing that Hernandez factors out isn’t at all times a good illustration of medicine-making locally. Medication males, and owl feathers, can be forces for good, he says. 

Certainly, in the course of the course of my Stikini analysis, I found that owls can be optimistic symbols to the Seminole individuals because of a ebook my aunt despatched me. In Oklahoma Seminoles: Medicines, Magic, and Faith, co-written by the elder Willie Lena and researcher James H. Howard, I discovered that the owl, along with its connection to witchcraft and shapeshifting, was additionally able to non secular safety. In keeping with Lena, it is good follow to hold owl feathers exterior of the house to keep at bay threats, as owls are nocturnal and the work of dangerous forces occurs at night time. The duality resonated with me after I thought concerning the notion of owls I had gained by means of my childhood obsession with Greek mythology, which paints them as omniscient knowledge keepers.

Whereas reporting and scripting this essay, I started to note with a wry humorousness simply how frequent owls are in on a regular basis imagery, showing on every little thing from trinkets to backyard decor. Whereas I perceive and respect my individuals’s trepidation about owls and what they symbolize, I started to discover a piece of ironic consolation of their presence. Being Indigenous typically includes balancing western methods of pondering with opposing data inside our neighborhood, and whereas I debated how one can write concerning the Stikini and Seminole beliefs round owls—or, truthfully, even when I ought to—the birds turned all of the extra particular to me as a solution to join additional with my heritage. What started as an eerie story from my grandma began to characterize cultural perseverance in my eyes, and this story, like lots of grandma’s, opened doorways for me to consider the previous and what endures between generations,