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

When my grandma speaks, I grasp 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 previous, grandma’s tales really feel like pooling water in my fingers, one thing valuable I have to protect.

Once 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 fantasy 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 evening within the late Nineties, when my dad was simply a young person.

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

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

According to our tradition’s beliefs, witches and drugs individuals with sturdy religious talents are the one ones able to reworking into the Stikini—and in true horror-movie vogue, the transformation is sort of grotesque. To take the type of an owl, they need to go to a secluded spot within the woods and expel their inside 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 includes a man with the top of an owl kneeling behind a stump. As soon as reworked, the beings, which characterize exacted revenge, will search out people to steal and eat their hearts. It’s not unusual for an unexplained dying or hassle inside a tribal group to be chalked as much as a go to from the Stikini.  

Quickly after my grandma shared this reminiscence, I started researching this fantasy for my very own cultural information and a possible story for the journal. It did not take me lengthy to comprehend reporting the piece is perhaps harder than I spotted—and the way critically my individuals take this terrifying creature.

Over the course of a number of weeks, I contacted three totally different individuals from my group 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 wanting again, I ought to’ve anticipated these reporting challenges. Once 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 folks had been unlikely to broach the subject in any respect—the story holds that a lot energy over our individuals. “It’s one thing that can all the time be a problem,” she informed me. “Particularly with those who’re actually conventional.”

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

Conscious of Utah’s giant Diné inhabitants, a number of years in the past the Tracy Aviary Middle in Salt Lake Metropolis started internet hosting Indigenous cultural programming, together with instructional assets 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 america. Rising up in Utah round many Diné and dealing in New Zealand’s Māori group as an grownup, Hernandez grew excited about cross-cultural interpretations of owls as he noticed how they appeared within the beliefs of Indigenous teams around the globe. As he started working with guests to the Tracy Aviary, he recollects encountering combined opinions towards the birds. On excursions the place Hernandez would offer 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 received totally different views,” Hernandez says of visitor’s diversified reactions of the owls, from fearful to nearly accepting. “I feel for some individuals, they’d be like, ‘Who’s gonna die within the household?’ After which for others, they had 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 dying.”

Indigenous representations of owls in well-liked tradition may replicate 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 immediately at them, and one recurring character retains owl statues outside of his house to push back visitors 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 dying 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 drugs males—one thing that Hernandez factors out isn’t all the time a good illustration of medicine-making in the neighborhood. Medication males, and owl feathers, can be forces for good, he says. 

Certainly, through the course of my Stikini analysis, I found that owls can be optimistic symbols to the Seminole individuals because of a guide my aunt despatched me. In Oklahoma Seminoles: Medicines, Magic, and Faith, co-written by the elder Willie Lena and researcher James H. Howard, I came upon that the owl, along with its connection to witchcraft and shapeshifting, was additionally able to religious safety. Based on Lena, it is good apply to hold owl feathers exterior of the house to push back threats, as owls are nocturnal and the work of unhealthy forces occurs at evening. The duality resonated with me after I thought concerning the notion of owls I had gained via 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 widespread owls are in on a regular basis imagery, showing on the whole lot 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 considering with opposing information inside our group, and whereas I debated methods to write concerning the Stikini and Seminole beliefs round owls—or, actually, even when I ought to—the birds grew to become all of the extra particular to me as a technique 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,