How the Stikini, a Terrifying Witch-Owl Shapeshifter, Brought Me Closer to My Seminole Roots

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 Even now, at 22 years outdated, grandma’s tales really feel like pooling water in my palms, one thing treasured I need to protect.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 delusion 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 Nineties, when my dad was simply an adolescent.

As she remembers it, my father had simply gained an enormous highschool basketball sport, and afterward he went celebrating with pals, leaving my grandma to drive the automobile dwelling. 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 to intimidate my father—solely to comprehend my grandma was alone. The automobile and its vivid headlights shortly 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 crimson 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. 

Concern 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 automobile as an alternative. The owls ultimately took flight, leaving in peace, however the night time has all the time caught along 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 normal methods, I respect them. I really feel that owls are dangerous omens.”

According to our tradition’s beliefs, witches and drugs folks with robust non secular talents are the one ones able to reworking into the Stikini—and in true horror-movie trend, the transformation is sort 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—publish 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 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 delusion for my very own cultural data and a possible story for the journal. It did not take me lengthy to comprehend reporting the piece is perhaps tougher than I spotted—and the way critically my folks take this terrifying creature.

Over the course of a number of weeks, I contacted three completely different folks from my group to interview, with two by no means responding and one other ghosting me after agreeing to speak. I stop attempting out of respect for his or her beliefs, however wanting again, I ought to’ve anticipated these reporting challenges. Once I instructed my nice aunt Sheila Little-Harjo, assistant chief of the tribe, that I used to be going to write 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 folks. “It’s one thing that may all the time be a difficulty,” she instructed me. “Particularly with those who’re actually conventional.”

While the Stikini delusion is strictly a Seminole story, my folks aren’t distinctive in relation to their sophisticated relationship with owls. Throughout Indigenous communities, owls are sometimes seen as dangerous 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 organize for loss locally, 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 constructive gentle, believing they’re returning spirits or intermediaries for drugs folks. 

Conscious of Utah’s giant Diné inhabitants, a couple of years in the past the Tracy Aviary Heart in Salt Lake Metropolis started internet hosting Indigenous cultural programming, together with academic 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 below his pen title Arcia Tecun, 

Hernandez is Winak, a diasporic Mayan dwelling in the USA. Rising up in Utah round many Diné and dealing in New Zealand’s Māori group as an grownup, Hernandez grew excited by 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 remembers encountering blended 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 completely different views,” Hernandez says of visitor’s various reactions of the owls, from fearful to nearly accepting. “I believe for some folks, 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 completely different relationships with dying.”

Indigenous representations of owls in fashionable tradition may 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 immediately at them, and one recurring character retains owl statues outside of his house to chase away 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 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 locally. Medication males, and owl feathers, may also be forces for good, he says. 

Certainly, in the course of the course of my Stikini analysis, I found that owls may also be constructive symbols to the Seminole folks due to a e book 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 non secular safety. In response to Lena, it is good observe to hold owl feathers outdoors of the house to chase away threats, as owls are nocturnal and the work of dangerous forces occurs at night time. The duality resonated with me once 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 every little thing from trinkets to backyard decor. Whereas I perceive and respect my folks’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 data inside our group, and whereas I debated learn how to write concerning the Stikini and Seminole beliefs round owls—or, truthfully, 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,