476 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 2 



organized or ruled in accordance with the great principles of the 

 now defunct League of the Iroquois; and so, it may be added, the 

 use of the phrase, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, as being repre- 

 sentative of the ancient institutions of the league, is but the droning 

 of a humbug. 



It is not the purpose here to define the earlier and characteristic 

 Iroquois woman in terms of the Iroquois woman of the modern 

 reservation system, because the two persons culturally have nothing 

 in common. 



Correctly to appraise and appreciate the true status and plenary 

 power or authority of woman in the Iroquois State it is needful to 

 enumerate and to define the several organic units of the league 

 institution, in which her voice and her will through institutional 

 means were made dominant and directive, and thus to understand 

 their relation to the institution of the league as a totality. Only 

 in this manner may the basic character of her rights, plenary power, 

 and essential duties and obligations be fully apprehended. 



The institutional organic units constituting the structure of the 

 League of the Iroquois are, beginning with the simplest: First, 

 the ohwachira; second, the sisterhood of ohwachira constituting the 

 clan ; third, the clan ; fourth, the two sisterhoods of clans in each tribe, 

 the one constituting the father side, and the other constituting the 

 mother side of the tribe; fifth, the union of these two sisterhoods 

 of clans constituting the tribe; sixth, the tribe; seventh, the two 

 sisterhoods of tribes, the one constituting the father side and the 

 other constituting the mother side of the league; eighth, the union of 

 these two sisterhoods of tribes constituting the League of the Iroquois. 



An ohwachira was an organized body of persons tracing descent 

 of blood from a common mother, the members being bound together 

 by the ties of common blood, the strongest bonds known to primitive 

 men, and so forming an exogamic incest group by a rigid inhibition 

 of sexual relations among its members formerly under the penalty 

 of death to the guilty couple; the ohwachira, however, did on occa- 

 sion exercise the right of adopting a person or persons of alien blood, 

 the blood tie being then a fiction of the law of adoption. 



The ohwachira was not composed of lesser or simpler civil or 

 political units. But, characteristically, persons were its constitutive 

 units. They were strictly and rigidly organized by their relative 

 positions in the line of descent and by their interrelations established 

 by their relative ages. The performance of obligations and the dis- 

 charge of duties were implicit in these several positions and so 

 regarded as obligatory. 



The said common mother and her daughters obtained husbands 

 from alien or rather unrelated incest groups or ohwachira; but the 



