38 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. Ill 



It is now established how the cane features in Iroquois ceremonial- 

 ism and social life. Sometimes the cane is combined with the 

 mnemonic record stick, but the latter has a separate form more nearly 

 resembling the prayer and record sticks of Central Algonquian 

 prophets and may refer to the same time level. Iroquois pictographs 

 have a consistent style, the figures of humans maintaining a broad- 

 shouldered narrow-hipped consistency found in war memorials of the 

 eighteenth century. 



ROLL CALLS OF OTHER FORMS 



Roll-call zvampum. — One of the most interesting records that has 

 been ascribed to the period of the founding of the League is a roll-call 

 wampum from the Mohawk of Six Nations Reserve that is now in 

 the safekeeping of the National Museum of Canada. In describing the 

 specimen. Diamond Jenness (1933, pp. 25-26) calls it the ". . . 

 covenant or Magna Charta of the League . . ., the record of its 

 foundation and organization, made by the Iroquois women at the 

 command of Dekanawida and his associates. . . ." The late Mohawk 

 Chief William Loft related the tradition that 



. . . Dekanaivida appointed fifty sachems from the five nations, . . . , made 

 them join hands in a circle, and ordained that they should be of equal rank and 

 bear individual titles. That they might remember their titles and position in the 

 council house, he then devised this wampum record, which he entrusted to the 

 keeping of an outstanding warrior, . . . who bore the title Sharenhhonwaneh, 

 "Majestic Tree," . . . first sachem of the wolf clan in the Mohawk nation. 

 The successors to this title . . . remained the official keepers of the record 

 down to . . . Chief Loft himself . . . 



Loft told how during the Revolutionary War it was buried by its 

 keeper inside a brass kettle where it remained 8 years, to be dug up 

 at the instance of Joseph Brant who obtained it for the ceremony of 

 rekindling the council fire of the Five Nations on the banks of the 

 Grand River in Canada. 



The record contains upward of 1,800 white wampum beads to 

 which Jenness attributes considerable antiquity, since X-rays show 

 that they are drilled from both ends. The record is formed into a 

 large circle by two entwined strings which symbolize "respectively 

 the Great Peace and the Great Law" that were established with the 

 beginnings of the League; and from the entwined circle depend 50 

 pendant strings to represent the 50 chiefs of the confederacy. "That 

 representing the seventh Onondaga sachem, Hononwiyendeh, . . . 

 keeper of all the records of the League, is slightly longer . . .", serv- 

 ing as a guide in reading the record and in laying it out. Jenness says 

 (p. 26) that the circle was laid down with all the pendants turned in 



