20 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. Ill 



readily to friends and neighbors ; his rights to certain kinds of knowl- 

 edge including medicinal formulae and prayers associated with talismen 

 or personal guardians are private and inviolate. Membership in a 

 maternal family confers upon the individual copyright privileges dur- 

 ing his lifetime to certain songs, a personal name, and possibly a 

 chiefship title which also belongs to the clan, to the tribe, and to 

 the League. Knowledge of a public ritual, however, is neither per- 

 sonal nor family property, although but few individuals acquire such 

 erudition. Likewise the mnemonic aids that an individual employs 

 to remind himself how the ritual proceeds belong to the group as 

 they have a public function ; and other members of his band and tribe 

 come to regard these properties as belonging with the group's ritual 

 paraphernalia. But the individual to whom the particular piece of 

 paraphernalia is entrusted and who employs it in the public ceremony 

 may come to feel a proprietary right to it that others do not share 

 or acknowledge. This, I think, is the case of Andrew Spragg and 

 the mnemonic cane that he had carried during innumerable journeys 

 on the road from Lower Cayuga to Onondaga Longhouse while 

 chanting the Eulogy to the Founders of the League. Andrew felt 

 entitled to carve his name on the stick, which his contemporaries 

 possibly and his survivors certainly considered as belonging to the 

 Cayuga Nation. 



The immediate reaction of an Upper Cayuga chief, to whom we 

 showed a diagram of the cane, was: "It never should have left the 

 reserve because it was [Cayuga] Nation property." The same chief 

 thought that the cane antedated Andrew Spragg and that it had 

 been entrusted to Spragg by some former keeper to use in the Con- 

 dolence Council. The late Simeon Gibson,^^ himself heir to a Cayuga 

 chiefship, was less positive that the cane belonged to the tribe. He 

 knew that the Lower Cayugas had had this cane, and that only that 

 band had one. That the Onondagas of the Three Brothers side 

 (Mohawk-Onondaga-Seneca) never used this cane all informants 

 agreed; its use was confined to the Four Brothers (Oneida-Cayuga- 

 Tuscarora-Tutelo). The Three Brothers manage without one. More- 

 over, Gibson, whose family was of the Lower Cayuga band, dis- 

 credited the statement of the Upper Cayuga chief by saying: 



The Lower Cayugas have been for years the only Cayugas who could sing 

 at the installation of chiefs on the Three Brothers side, for until recently 

 there have been no singers of the ritual at the Sour Springs (Upper) Cayuga 

 Longhouse. 



12 For an account of the man and the writer's field work on the Six Nations 

 Reserve to that date, see "Simeon Gibson : Iroquois Informant, 1889-1943" 

 (Fenton, 1944). 



