^8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. Ill 



I turned to the contemporaries and neighbors of A. Spragg among 

 the Lower Cayugas. As is so often the case, the problem solved itself 

 while attempting to solve two others. 



In 1945, while editing a paper of Hewitt's on Iroquois mnemonic 

 pictographs which involved identifying a set of similar pictographs 

 which Cayuga Chief Charles had inscribed in a notebook, I found 

 a list that would fit the cane. Hewitt obtained from Chief Charles 

 in 191 7 a complete text in Onondaga for the Eulogy, together with 

 an independent list of chiefs whose clan eponyms are differentiated 

 (B.A.E. Mss. Nos. 1281-a, 3558). Like many of his contemporaries 

 on the Six Nations Reserve, Chief Charles used another dialect than 

 the language of his tribe — in this case Onondaga, although he was a 

 Cayuga. In early 1948 a similar identification was made of a list 

 in Mohawk by Seth Newhouse (Fenton, 1949). By typing both lists 

 on opposite sides of a blueprint of the cane, the titles opposite the 

 pegs in sequence, I reached a precise correspondence for the picto- 

 graphs in Mohawk of 1885 and in Onondaga of 191 7. 



Title and pictograph. — The meaning of the pictographs depends 

 on how the titles of the 50 founders are interpreted. This was the 

 problem of the lists and how to get correspondence. The interpreta- 

 tion of the titles is subject to the vagaries that attend the meanings 

 of all Iroquois personal names. Names descend in the maternal 

 family, usually skipping a generation, and such names as have become 

 attached to offices, which also descend with the name in the maternal 

 family, acquire special qualities. Many of these titles are descriptive 

 of activities in which the original holder was found engaged when 

 the League was formed. Others were maternal family and clan names 

 then in use. As such they may be shared by the same clan in another 

 tribe, where perhaps the name is not attached to an office. Dialect 

 and folklore have altered the names. They are also subject to con- 

 tinual reinterpretation by native theorists. The roll call of the 50 

 founders is supposed to be chanted in Mohawk ; but it also enumerates 

 rosters of Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca chiefs whose titles 

 must have originated in the several tribal dialects before the League 

 was formed. Onondaga, Seneca, and Cayuga ritualists render the 

 titles differently. With the titles has descended a body of lore telling 

 what the founders were up to when discovered by Deganawi'dah and 

 Hiawatha. Dialect slowly alters the titles and their meanings, and 

 folklore shifts more rapidly, engendering controversy among tribal 

 ritualists as to just what the titles do mean. Hale quite honestly held 

 that the meanings of many of the names were lost, and that they had 

 in fact become titles. For purposes of describing the Cayuga Con- 



