ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT 9 



During the year Mr. J. N. B. Hewitt, ethnologist, con- 

 tinued his studies on the Iroquois. In 1900 and immedi- 

 ately subsequent years Mr. Hewitt undertook seriously to 

 record in native texts the extant rituals, ordinances, and 

 laws pertaining to the institutions and structure of the 

 League or Confederation of the Five (later Six) Tribes 

 or Nations of the Iroquois of New York State. At that 

 time there were still living two or three men among the 

 Iroquois of Canada who grasped more or less fully the 

 intent and purpose of the various institutions of this 

 league, and Mr. Hewitt had then acquired a conversational 

 knowledge of the two languages in which these rituals, or- 

 dinances, and laws were chiefly expressed, to wit, the 

 Mohawk and the Onondaga. The use of the Cayuga, 

 Oneida, and Seneca was exceptional. 



From these men Mr. Hewitt obtained standard texts 

 in the native tongues of the informants. The death of 

 two of these informants made a study of the material 

 furnished by them difficult. Resort was had then to other 

 less noted informants in these matters, and there was ob- 

 tained a large number of versions of portions of the stand- 

 ard texts already mentioned, which disclosed views and 

 statements which it seemed impossible to harmonize with 

 those appearing in the standard texts. It was imperative 

 that the value of these discordant statements should be 

 ascertained where possible and that palpable omissions 

 from the standard texts should be utilized. The task was 

 to ascertain in these analytical studies what was trans- 

 mitted tradition and what was the personal opinion of 

 the informant, unwittingly expressed. 



This work of comparison was undertaken to secure the 

 best possible translations, interlinear and free, of the sev- 

 eral native texts thus studied. The texts of the Installa- 

 tion Chant, the Eulogy of the Founders, of the Traditional 

 Biography of Deganawida which describes in great detail 

 the years of difficult work which had to be done to estab- 

 lish the League of the Five Tribes of the Iroquois in the 

 Stone Age of America, and also the native text of the 



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