206 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



no Federal representation in the Council of the League. Evidently 

 they had vicarious representation in the officers of some sister clan. 



The Mohawk and the Oneida tribes had nine Federal Chief ships 

 respectively, equally apportioned among the three clans. But it is 

 found that the titles of Chief ship do not belong to the clan as a 

 whole. Certain Ohwachira (or uterine broods or families) within 

 the clan owned such titles, one such to every owning Ohwachira. 



It is a well-known fact to careful students of the tribes of the Iro- 

 quois League and of cognate tribes that there is a perplexing dis- 

 crepancy in the number and in the names of the clans assigned to 

 these several tribes in the several lists found in the literature on the 

 subject. In the Mourner's Chant of Welcome in the Ritual of Con- 

 dolence and Installation of the League, the Liturgy, after reciting a 

 long list of towns assigned to the Wolf, the Turtle, and the Bear 

 Clans, contains this brief statement : " This was the number of the 

 Clans in ancient times." These three clans are the only ones found 

 among the Mohawk and the Oneida tribes. The other tribes of the 

 original League, the Onondaga, the Seneca, and the Cayuga, have 

 these and five or six others. 



This fact is noteworthy since the Mohawk tribe belongs to the Male 

 or Father tribal phratry, while the Oneida belongs to the Female or 

 Mother tribal phratry. Thus, it seems probable that these three clans 

 were the founding clans of the League and that therefore they were 

 primordial. The researches of the writer among the scattered rem- 

 nants of the Wyandot peoples disclose the remarkable fact that these 

 peoples had a like organization of the three clans, the Wolf, the Turtle, 

 and the Bear, each having three Ohwachira, and each Ohwachira pos- 

 sessing a Chiefship title, thus making nine Chieftains for the three 

 clans. 



The writer had the satisfaction also of demonstrating conclusively 

 that the Chieftainesses of the several Ohwachira formerly bore of- 

 ficial personal names which corresponded with those of the male Fed- 

 eral Chieftains, like Tckari'ho'ke n< and Haiyo n 'Inud"t' ha' . This sys- 

 tem of names has long been lost to the teachers of the Iroquois 

 peoples. 



Attention was also devoted to the methods of preparing wampum 

 strings, for the purpose of determining whether the admixture of the 

 white and the purple beads in varying proportions was in accordance 

 with fixed rules. The writer was urged to do this because of the very 

 contradictory meanings assigned to a large collection of such strings 

 in his possession. 



