J. N. B. Hewitt

“ In certain laws the federal chiefs are denominated standing trees, who as essential components of the great tree of the league are absorbed in it, symbolically, and who are thus said to have one head, one heart, one mind, one blood, and one dish of food.
The ties which unite a tribe with its gods—ties of faith and the bonds of duty and obligation of service which bind the persons of the tribe unitedly together, ties of blood and affinity—are the strongest operative among tribal men and women. ”

“ The dominant motive for the establishment of the League of the Five Iroquois Tribes was the impelling necessity to stop the shedding of human blood by violence through the making and ratifying of a universal peace by all the known tribes of men, to safeguard human life and health and welfare. ”

“ The institution of the condoling and installation council was important and most essential to the maintenance of the integrity of their state, for the ordinances of the league constitution required that the number of the chiefs in the federal council should be kept intact. So to the orenda, or magic power, believed to emanate and flow from the words, the chants and songs, and the acts of this council, did the statesmen and the ancients of the Iroquois peoples look for the conservation of their political integrity and for the promotion of their welfare. ”

“ In the ritual of the installation of chiefs in all the many addresses and chants and songs, each of the two constituent organic members, the father and the mother sides, is addressed as a single individual. In the famous so-called six songs of the mourning and installation council, which are so dramatically sung by a chief who represents the dead chief or chiefs to be resurrected, each of the two constituent persons is addressed, but in the fifth song, the totality, the league as a unity is addressed as a person, to whom is sung this farewell song of the departing chief. ”

“ There is a dualism in organization running through all public assemblies of the Iroquois peoples living under the earlier culture. It must be noted that this dual character of the tribal and league organization does not rest on blood ties or affinity, or on common religious rites, but rather on the motive to dramatize two dominant principles which appear to pervade and energize all observed sentient life. In short, this dualism is based primarily on certain mythic concepts regarding the source of life and the most effective means of conserving it on earth among men. ”

“ The proposal to include all the tribes of men in such a league of comity and peace is the more remarkable in view of the fact that that was an age of fierce tribalism, whose creed was that no person had any rights of life or property outside of the tribe to whose528 jurisdiction he or she belonged, and that every person when beyond the limits of his or her tribe’s protection was an outlaw, and common game for the few who still indulged in the horrid appetite of cannibalism. ”

“ In the Stone Age of America the Mohawk, the Onondaga, the Oneida, the Cayuga, and the Seneca, five Iroquoian tribes dwelling in the central and the eastern regions of what is to-day the State of New York, established a tribal federation or league, with a carefully prepared constitution, based on peace, righteousness, justice, and power. These five Iroquois tribes spoke dialects of the Iroquoian stock of languages, which is one of about 50 spoken north of Mexico. ”

“ While the pursuit of game, and fish, and birds, and men who are not fixed in the earth was strictly within the prerogative of the men.
The ohwachira through its matron exercised the right to spare, or to take, if needs be, the life of prisoners of war in its behalf and offered to it for adoption. Such briefly is the ohwachira of Iroquoian social organization.
The Iroquoian clan is an intratribal exogamic body of uterine kin, real, or such by legal fiction, regimented for the purpose of securing and promoting their social and political welfare. ”

“ In so far as known the ohwachira, unlike the clan, does not bear the designative name of a tutelary or other protecting genius, or “totem” as it is commonly but loosely called when applied to a clan; and yet it is commonly known that the influential matron of an ohwachira usually bears the reputation of being deft in the peculiar arts of the sorceress, each of which being the potence or orenda of some tutelary.
The matron of an ohwachira is usually, not always, the oldest woman in it. ”

“ In brief, these are the ohwachira (= the uterine family) , of which one or more constitutes a clan; the clan, of which one or more may constitute a sisterhood, or, as it is usually called, a phratry of clans; the sisterhood or phratry of clans, of which only two constitute a tribe in Iroquois social organization; the tribe, of which two or three constitute a sisterhood or phratry of tribes; and finally the league or confederation which is composed of just two sisterhoods or phratries of tribes. ”

“ Schoolcraft, when gathering material for his Notes on the Iroquois, received a number of fragmentary mythic tales about the Iroquoian god, the Master of Life and also traditional stories about one of the chief founders of the league. But as these had been confounded by Clark and made to relate to a single individual Schoolcraft undiscriminatingly adopted this intermixture, and added to the mischief by transferring Hiawatha to the region of the Great Lakes, and there identified him with Nanabozho, the Master of Life, or God of Life, of the Chippewa and other Algonquian cognates. ”

“ There were, indeed, groups of fighters who were regimented and organized, not in a practical or rational manner and mood, but in accordance with mythical and sociological conceptions and predispositions, and strictly with relation to their kinship status, individually and severally, in the tribal organization to which they belonged. For every tribe, great or small, or group of tribes, was, exclusive of the women and the children, an inchoate, undifferentiate army, a group of instant or else actual fighters. ”

“ Eastward, along and beyond the Hudson River dwelt the Mohegan and their cognates who also spoke Algonquian dialects. Such summarily was the tribal environment of the five Iroquois tribes at the era of the institution of their league or confederation. Tradition is silent as to any extensive warfare with these surrounding tribes anterior to the founding of the league.
History records the use of two fundamentally distinct methods of grouping peoples by means of institutional bonds. The grouping of men in this manner has been aptly termed regimentation. ”

“ The ohwachira or uterine family was the primary unit of the social organization of all Iroquoian tribes. It must not be overlooked that the members of an ohwachira could not marry one another, nor could the members of a clan, composed of one, two, or more, such ohwachira, which by thus uniting to form a single organic unit become sisters, or sister ohwachira, and the members of the unit so formed become exogamous with relation to one another. ”

“ When an ohwachira became an integral part of a clan—a higher unit—it necessarily delegated some of its self-government to this higher unit in such wise as to make this union of coordinate units more cohesive and interdependent. Thus the institution of every higher organic unit produced new privileges, duties, and rights, and the individual came under a more complex control and his welfare become more secure through tribunals exercising a greater number of delegated powers in wider jurisdiction. ”

“ From the legends and traditions of such a people it is learned that all that they have, all that they do ritually, and all that they know, they have received freely by the grace of their gods. The tribes of the Iroquois people were no exception to this rule.
In Iroquois polity there was a definite separation of purely civil from strictly religious affairs. So the office of civil chief was clearly marked off from that of prophet or priest, and in so far as an incumbent was concerned it was the gift of the suffrages of a definite group of his clanswomen, and so in no sense was it hereditary. ”

“ His mother and grandmother were poor and despised and lived alone in a small lodge by themselves on the outskirts of the village to which they belonged, and so they had few, if any, visitors who might seek the daughter for a wife. But there came a day when the watchful mother became aware that her daughter would herself in due time give birth to a child, and bitterly did she reprove her for not marrying a man in the customary way, for now she was bringing scandal upon her mother and herself. ”

“ If he refuse to reform he is at once deposed, the chief warrior figuratively removing from his head the “symbolic horns” (i. e., receiving back the wampum strings which are the certificate of his official title) of his title and handing them to the matron. (This is, in brief, the recall of modern times.)
In the structure of the league several ohwachira, some having a chiefship title, are incorporated to form one clan, so that this clan is represented in the tribal or the federal council by two or more chieftains. It so happens that the Mohawk and the Oneida tribes have only three clans each ”

“ The daughter, however, steadfastly denied that she had had commerce with any man at any time, but her mother doubted her and carried her reproof so far as to cause the daughter much bitterness of spirit, and she, therefore, spent much time in silently weeping, for she loved her mother and claimed that she did not know the cause of her pregnancy, and she was deeply grieved by her mother’s chiding. ”

“ And so as an institution the league was conceived as an animate being, endowed with definite biotic properties and functions, as the male and female sexes, fatherhood and motherhood, mind, eyesight, dream power, human blood, and the possession of guardian spirits for its two highest organic members. ”

“ They, however, decided to destroy the life of the child when it should be born because of the dream’s declaration that he would grow up and be the source of evil to their people. So when the child was born they carried it to a neighboring stream of water, which was frozen over, and cutting a hole in the ice thrust the child into it to drown, and they returned to their lodge. ”

“ To overcome the power of death, to repair his destructive work, and to restore to its normal potency the orenda or magic power of the stricken father side or mother side of the league, and so making the entire league whole, were some of its motives. ”

“ In like manner it appeared that woman, the mother, was a producer, and nourished what she produced on her breast; hence, the woman and the earth are sisters. So the cultivation of the things that grow out of the earth is especially the duty and pleasure of woman. ”

“ It is thus seen that the mental grasp and outlook of these prophet-statesmen and stateswomen of the Iroquois looked out beyond the limits of tribal boundaries to a vast sisterhood and brotherhood of all the tribes of men, dwelling in harmony and happiness. ”

“ In the first, men are regimented or organized on the basis of kinship and affinity, real or as a legal fiction, and in the second, men are regimented or organized in institutional units on the basis of territory. But history records transitional forms of organization, and the most important of these is the feudal, for both methods mentioned above are found in feudal society, showing transition from tribal to national society and government. ”

“ In one tradition Hiawatha when first seen by Deganawida was a cannibal and was actually engaged in bringing the carcass of a human being into his lodge, which he quickly proceeded to quarter and cook in a pot of water. He had been out hunting for human beings, and meeting this one had killed him for his larder. ”

“ Thus, every ohwachira which had women who were married was interrelated with many cousin streams of blood, and it is these outside ties which bound together the various blood streams. Iroquoian society is then held together by the bonds of affinity, while the tracing of the descent of blood through the women preserved its purity and insured its continuity. ”

“ The constructive results of the control and guidance of human thinking and conduct in the private, the public, and the foreign relations of the peoples so leagued by these six principles, the reformers maintained, are the establishment and the conservation of what is reverently called Ne’′ Gayanĕñ‘sä’gō′nǎ‘—i. ”

“ Every undeveloped543 people or human brood of one blood and origin live under the direct care and special providence of its gods and so seeks to maintain, by suitable rite and ceremony, unbroken and intact relation and converse with them. ”

“ Its founders did not limit the scope of this confederation to the five Iroquoian tribes mentioned above, but they proposed for themselves and their posterity the greater task of gradually bringing under this form of government all the known tribes of men, not as subject peoples but as confederates. ”

“ This ascription of sex to groups—organic groups—of persons measurably explains the potent motive which underlies the apparently artificial rule of exogamy that controls certain groups of persons as against other like groups of persons. ”

“ It was conceived as having four great white roots composed of living men and women, extending respectively eastward, southward, westward, and northward, among the tribes of men who were urgently invited to unite with the league by laying their heads on the great white root nearest to them. ”