LEAGUE OF IROQUOIS HEWITT. 533 



family) of some clan. The ceremony of adoption was so potent that 

 where two alien sisters were adopted, each into a clan which inter- 

 married with the other, their children intermarried as coming from 

 exogamous groups. 



Whatever land was held by the ohwachira for cultivation and on 

 which fuel and berries and nuts and roots and bark and medicines 

 and poisons were procured, belonged exclusively to the women of the 

 ohwachira. 



Ordinarily, the members of an ohwachira were obligated to pur- 

 chase the life of one of its members who had forfeited it by a 

 homicide and to pay for the life of the victim as well. 



It was seen that the earth produced things which were fixed in her 

 breast ; all the things that grow whether corn, beans, squashes, berries, 

 or nuts, are nourished directly by the earth. In like manner it ap- 

 peared 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. 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 Iro- 

 quoian 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. The clan has a 

 name, which serves as a class or preferably unit name for its mem- 

 bers, and which is derived usually from some animal or bird or 

 reptile belonging to the habitat of the ancestors of this body of 

 kin, or to its customary tutelary genius. The lineal descent of blood, 

 the inheritance of property, both personal and common, and the 

 hereditary right of eligibility to public office and trust are traced in 

 the clan through the female line attained through the action and 

 interaction of its constitutive units — the ohwachira (the uterine 

 families). 



The Iroquoian clan is constituted organically of one or more 

 ohwachira; its chief or chieftains came to it through its constituent 

 ohwachira which may have possessed such officers. A large number 

 of the characteristics of the ohwachira may be predicated of the clan, 

 for the reason that the ohwachira gave up for administration to this 

 larger grouping a number of their functions. So that a clear knowl- 

 edge of the ohwachira is first needed to understand what a clan is. 

 136650°— 20 35 



