484 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 2 



to become a noted and spiritually forceful woman, should she be at 

 once concealed and guarded from the sight and presence of all per- 

 sons except those of her mother or other trusted person until she at- 

 tained fully grown womanhood. To make her concealment efi'ective 

 the place of her seclusion was carefully covered with the down of 

 the cat-tail flag or corn husks. 



During this seclusion such a person was regarded as under the 

 tutelage of a guardian spirit whose guardianship had begun before 

 birth, and the subject was thought to acquire much abstruse wisdom 

 and spiritual force of character from other tutelaries. 



Because of the means employed to make the concealment most 

 effective, such a hidden person was said to be " down guarded." 

 " husk fended," or " down inclosed," and to have acquired a quasi 

 sacred or divine character. 



Such a divine person then was the mother of Deganawida. It was, 

 therefore, not at all strange for tradition to assert that such a virgin 

 maiden could receive life directly from the Creator of men, with- 

 out the physical mediation of the complementary sex. And thus 

 arose the belief that Deganawida had no earthly father, but that 

 his life came to his virgin mother directlj' from the hands of the 

 Creator. His nativity then was truly a virgin birth. 



In her name coming to us from the Stone Age in North America 

 the noun stem, -^c>"'stf-, meaning " face," is of course metaphorically 

 used instead of the term denoting the entire person ; so substituting 

 the word " person " in the foregoing translations of the name, 

 Djigo^''sd''^see\ its full force and significance becomes clear. The 

 predicative -'se^', meaning " new," " fresh from the maker," " pure," 

 " innocent," " infantile," has its force here doubled by the iterative 

 prefix Dji- (for dj-, "again," "over," and -ye-^ "one"). So that 

 this characterizing proper name means " The Most New Person," 

 " The Most Youthful Person," " The Most Pure Person," or " The 

 Person the Most Like a New-born Babe." 



Hence, at the great installation council in which the federal 

 chieftains received their commissions, both men and women, the 

 mother of Deganawida assisted her great son in this epochal cere- 

 mony, and she thenceforth became the type of all future women 

 trustee chieftains. This was another worthy tribute to the worth of 

 Iroquois womanhood. 



In the law governing the settlement or adjustment of murders, 

 especially those arising from the blood feud, the legal tender for the 

 killing of a man by another was 20 strings of wampum — 10 strings 

 for the dead person and 10 strings for the life of the killer which of 

 course had been forfeited by his unfortunate act. But in the case of 

 the killing of a woman by a man the legal tender was fixed at 30 



