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

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When my grandma speaks, I hang onto her words with a burning curiosity. Her voice, thick with a lilting twang that could only come from a tried-and-true Oklahoman, wraps around my earliest memories. Sidling up to her on the couch as she did her makeup in the mornings, I’d anticipate tales of my great-grandfather, or lessons in our Native language, Mvskoke (Muscogee Creek), spoken by our tribe the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Even now, at 22 years old, grandma’s stories feel like pooling water in my hands, something precious I must preserve.

When I first began an editorial fellowship with Audubon last winter, she asked if I’d heard about the Stikini, the owl-transforming shapeshifter in Seminole myth that’s capable of hiding in plain sight and sowing woe. In our language, the word Stikinicomes from Estek’ené (ih-stih-kin-ee), which translates to Great Horned Owl, and I’d never heard of it. She then proceeded to tell me about once encountering these creatures. An ominous tone took over as she pulled me into her memory of one night in the late 1990s, when my dad was just a teenager.

As she remembers it, my father had just won a big high school basketball game, and afterward he went celebrating with friends, leaving my grandma to drive the car home. On a dark and empty back road, a player from the opposing team raced up alongside her and glared into the driver’s window—a clear attempt to intimidate my father—only to realize my grandma was alone. The car and its bright headlights quickly peeled off, but not before leaving her badly shaken. Arriving at their house, she recalls being met by four small circles hovering in the air, gleaming yellow and tinged red in the headlights. Gradually coming into focus, the orbs materialized into two large owls, looming like shadows come to life as they stared at her. 

Fear settled into grandma’s stomach. Owls could mean only one thing: Someone was sending her a warning. Thoughts began to swirl in her head as she realized something awful could have happened if my dad had been the one in the car instead. The owls eventually took flight, leaving in peace, but the night has always stuck with her. She believed, and still does, that the owls were Stikini bearing a message. “Owls are looked at as evil beings,” my grandma says about that night. “While I don’t really follow all the traditional ways, I respect them. I feel that owls are bad omens.”

According to our culture’s beliefs, witches and medicine people with strong spiritual abilities are the only ones capable of transforming into the Stikini—and in true horror-movie fashion, the transformation is quite gruesome. To take the form of an owl, they must go to a secluded spot in the woods and expel their inner organs to make themselves malleable enough to shift from human to animal. The late Indigenous artist Kelly Haney (Seminole, Muscogee Creek) captured the process—post vomiting, thankfully—in his painting The Transformation, which features a man with the head of an owl kneeling behind a stump. Once transformed, the beings, which represent exacted revenge, will seek out individuals to steal and eat their hearts. It’s not uncommon for an unexplained death or trouble within a tribal community to be chalked up to a visit from the Stikini.  

Soon after my grandma shared this memory, I began researching this myth for my own cultural knowledge and a potential story for the magazine. It didn’t take me long to realize reporting the piece might be more difficult than I realized—and how seriously my people take this terrifying creature.

Over the course of several weeks, I contacted three different people from my community to interview, with two never responding and another ghosting me after agreeing to talk. I quit trying out of respect for their beliefs, but looking back, I should’ve expected these reporting challenges. When I told my great aunt Sheila Little-Harjo, assistant chief of the tribe, that I was going to write about the Stikini, she warned me that people were unlikely to broach the topic at all—the story holds that much power over our people. “It’s something that will always be an issue,” she told me. “Especially with the ones who are really traditional.”

While the Stikini myth is strictly a Seminole story, my people aren’t unique when it comes to their complicated relationship with owls. Across Indigenous communities, owls are often seen as bad omens and symbols of death. For the Diné, also known as the Navajo, owls are commonly seen as harbingers of death. To see an owl is a sign to prepare for loss in the community, family, or even one’s own demise. Other Indigenous cultures like the Ojibwe and the Inuit associate owls with the dead but in a more positive light, believing they are returning spirits or intermediaries for medicine people. 

Aware of Utah’s large Diné population, a few years ago the Tracy Aviary Center in Salt Lake City began hosting Indigenous cultural programming, including educational resources and Native naming around their birds and lands.  As part of this work, Indigenous employees from the center wrote a three-part series of blog posts sharing their perspectives on owls and Indigenous beliefs in conservation. Daniel Hernandez, who served as the organization’s inaugural director of culture from 2022 to 2024,  wrote one of the blogs under his pen nameArcia Tecun, 

Hernandez is Winak, a diasporic Mayan living in the United States. Growing up in Utah around many Diné and working in New Zealand’s Māori community as an adult, Hernandez grew interested in cross-cultural interpretations of owls as he saw how they appeared in the beliefs of Indigenous groups around the world. As he began working with visitors to the Tracy Aviary, he recalls encountering mixed opinions toward the birds. On tours where Hernandez would provide Indigenous lessons, he would give ample warnings of the owl enclosure on the premises, and some Native visitors refusing to even go near them.

“I got different perspectives,” Hernandez says of guest’s varied reactions of the owls, from fearful to almost accepting. “I think for some people, they’d be like, ‘Who’s gonna die in the family?’ And then for others, they were like, ‘Oh, thank you for the warning.’ So it was really interesting to see that, because I felt like it represented their different relationships with death.”

Indigenous representations of owls in popular culture can also reflect this fraught relationship. Sterlin Harjo (Seminole, Muscogee Creek) and Taika Waitii’s (Māori) show, Reservation Dogs, which depicts the lives of Indigenous teens on an Oklahoma reservation, is a recent notable example. The show features owls in multiple episodes with their eyes blurred out to keep Indigenous viewers from having to look directly at them, and one recurring character keeps owl statues outside of his house to ward off guests as part of his hermit lifestyle.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon, meanwhile,uses an owl to alert the film’s Osage characters of a coming death in the family. And over on the AMC show Dark Winds, which follows fictional tribal police on a Navajo reservation, owl feathers are depicted as tools for dark magic by medicine men—something that Hernandez points out isn’t always a fair representation of medicine-making in the community. Medicine men, and owl feathers, can also be forces for good, he says. 

Indeed, during the course of my Stikini research, I discovered that owls can also be positive symbols to the Seminole people thanks to a book my aunt sent me. In Oklahoma Seminoles: Medicines, Magic, and Religion, co-written by the elder Willie Lena and researcher James H. Howard, I found out that the owl, in addition to its connection to witchcraft and shapeshifting, was also capable of spiritual protection. According to Lena, it’s good practice to hang owl feathers outside of the home to ward off threats, as owls are nocturnal and the work of bad forces happens at night. The duality resonated with me when I thought about the perception of owls I had gained through my childhood obsession with Greek mythology, which paints them as omniscient wisdom keepers.

While reporting and writing this essay, I began to notice with a wry sense of humor just how common owls are in everyday imagery, appearing on everything from trinkets to garden decor. While I understand and respect my people’s trepidation about owls and what they symbolize, I began to find a piece of ironic comfort in their presence. Being Indigenous often involves balancing western ways of thinking with opposing knowledge within our community, and while I debated how to write about the Stikini and Seminole beliefs around owls—or, honestly, even if I should—the birds became all the more special to me as a way to connect further with my heritage. What began as an eerie tale from my grandma started to represent cultural perseverance in my eyes, and this story, like many of grandma’s, opened doors for me to think about the past and what endures between generations,