480 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1932 



cedure for the deposition of these officers for cause ; being the source 

 of the life in her ohwachira, and through it of that of the tribe, she 

 exercised the exclusive prerogative of adopting aliens into her 

 ohwachira, and no man had the right to exercise this prerogative; 

 she exercised on occasion the authority of forbidding her brothers 

 and her sons from going on the warpath ; not infrequently the male 

 federal chieftains, to avoid a rupture with a foreign people, took 

 advantage of this prerogative of the women, asking them to disband 

 the warriors when they had become unruly and disregarded the 

 wish of the male federal council. 



The mothers, the adult women of the ohwachira, because they were 

 the natural source of life in it, exercised the right of granting life 

 or of decreeing death to alien prisoners who might become their 

 share of the spoils of war for the replacement of some of their own 

 kindred who may have been killed ; the woman might demand from 

 her husband's clansmen, or from those of her daughters, a captive 

 or a scalp to replace a loss in her ohwachira. 



The women of the several ohwachira elected trustee chieftainesses 

 who were the executive officers of the women whom they represented ; 

 these female officials provided by public levy or contributions the 

 food required at festivals, ceremonials, and at general assemblies of 

 the public, or for public charity; they kept a close watch on the 

 policies and the course of affairs as affecting the welfare of the tribe 

 as shaped by the male federal council; they guarded scrupulously 

 the interests of the public treasury, with power to maintain its re- 

 sources, consisting in late times of strings and belts of wampum, 

 quill and feather work, furs, corn, meal, fresh and dried or smoked 

 meats, and of other things, which might serve for defraying and 

 meeting public expenses and obligations, and to have a voice in the 

 disposal of what the treasury might contain. Indeed, the woman 

 owned not only the lands and the village sites but also the burial 

 grounds of the clan in which her sons and brothers, her daughters 

 and sisters, were buried. 



The women of the ohwachira sought husbands among the men of 

 ohwachira belonging to clans other than that to which their own 

 ohwachira belonged. As a general statement of fact, the ohwachira 

 owed certain important obligations and duties to the ohwachira in 

 which their sons and brothers had obtained wives and had produced 

 offspring. In the event of the death of such a child, it was the 

 solemn duty of the ohwachira of the child's father to assume at once 

 the tasks made necessary by the event; to care for and prepare the 

 corpse for burial, to dig the grave, to prepare the bark case for the 

 corpse, to provide the food needed for the customary wake or wakes 

 for the dead, to supply a celebrant to make the usual address of 



