author

Mabel Powers

Remembered for retelling Iroquois stories for young readers, this early-20th-century writer and lecturer also spent decades speaking about peace, women’s rights, and cross-cultural understanding. Her life was closely tied to western New York and the Chautauqua movement, where she became a familiar and compelling public voice.

1 Audiobook

Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children

Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children

by Mabel Powers

About the author

Born in Hamburg, New York, in 1872, she studied in Buffalo and later trained in elocution and drama in Philadelphia. As a young woman she taught in Rochester and began publishing articles about Native American life while still quite young.

She is best known for Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children (1917), now in the public domain and preserved by the Library of Congress. Sources from Chautauqua and Lapham’s Quarterly describe her as a writer, lecturer, feminist, and pacifist who became especially associated with Iroquois history and storytelling.

In 1910, during a ceremony on the Tonawanda Seneca Reservation, she was adopted into the Seneca Snipe Clan and given the name Yehsennohwehs, often translated as “she who carries and tells the stories.” She later settled near Chautauqua and appeared there more than 130 times between 1915 and her death in 1966, building a reputation as a vivid speaker whose work linked regional history, storytelling, and ideals of peace.