84 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



which abrogated for the tribes of the League of the Iroquois the 

 lex talionis, the law of blood revenge. 



The late Chief John Arthur Gibson dictated a lengthy text in the 

 Onondaga dialect embodying in great detail the law of atonement, 

 which clearly shows the means adopted by Deganawida and his 

 counselors to nullify the age-old lex talionis, that is to say, the grim 

 law of requital in kind in homicides. The contents of this remarkable 

 law of atonement are so unique that the writer devoted much time 

 to a study and analysis of the law. It deals with ohwachira (or uterine 

 families) as the interested parties and the federal council of the league 

 as the court of last resort, and so its enforcement was an intricate 

 procedure, which must be studied to make clear the full intent of this 

 law of atonement in homicides. 



From time immemorial the blood feud had existed among the 

 Iroquoian tribes. It was an ever-present cause of the killing of per- 

 sons, the loss of whom the several communities could not well afford. 

 Various remedial measures were in vogue to check this cause of the 

 loss of valuable lives. Within the jurisdiction of the Iroquois tribes 

 the blood feud involved groups of persons, ohwachira, but not in- 

 dividuals, because the ohwachira (the uterine kin) was the simplest 

 and smallest legal person. The individual in tribal law did not exist 

 outside of the ohwachira in which he was born. 



The writer's study of the law of atonement for homicides in the 

 blood feud disclosed some essential differences between it and the 

 antecedent and contemporary measures in vogue among the Huron 

 and other tribes for terminating blood feuds. Unlike these measures 

 the law of atonement promulgated by Deganawida and the federal 

 council of the league fixed the amount of the compensation for a 

 homicide and made it the legal tender in such cases, thus limiting 

 measurably the impulse to excess in taking revenge. 



This excellent result was achieved by the device of setting a legal 

 price on the life of a man and on that of a woman. The price set 

 on the life of a male person was 10 strings of shell or wampum beads, 

 each 5 hand-spans long. The legal tender, therefore, for the atonement 

 for the slaying of a male person by a male was fixed at 20 such strings, 

 because by the rights and obligations of the blood feud the life of the 

 slayer was forfeited to the kin of the slain person, and so it had to be 

 retrieved. The price set on the life of a female person was appraised 

 at double that of a male person, namely, 20 strings of shell or wampum 

 beads, each 5 hand-spans in length, so that for the killing of a female 

 person by another female person the legal tender in such case to be 

 offered by the ohwachira of the murderess to the aggrieved ohwachira 

 was therefore fixed at 40 such strings. 



