128 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 66 



Gibson of the Cayuga tribe, a son and disciple of his great father, 

 the late Chief John Arthur Gibson of the Seneca tribe. In this 

 account " The Fatherless " is represented as having established 

 among the Cayuga people a form of civil government, the exact type 

 of which he later in life founded among the Five Iroquois tribes, in- 

 clusive of the Cayuga. It is stated that the Cayuga statesmen did not 

 realize the suitability of that form of government to the affairs and 

 welfare of all men, and so they had limited its scope and benefits 

 selfishly to their own Cayuga people. And this account relates that 

 because of this bad stewardship on the part of the Cayuga people it 

 became needful for " The Fatherless " to return " from the sky "' 

 to the neighbor tribes of the Cayuga for the purpose of establishing 

 among them the League of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, of which 

 he declared all the tribes of men should be co-equal members. 



Further, in this account there is an attempt to explain the origin 

 of the obtrusive dualism which appears as the basis of all public 

 institutions of the Iroquois peoples. According to this explanation 

 this dualism arose merely from an alleged agreement between two 

 Cayuga persons who were related the one to the other as " Father 

 And Son," or better, as " Mother And Daughter," to transact public 

 affairs jointly from opposite sides of the Council Fire. It is seen 

 that this explanation seemingly does not account satisfactorily for 

 the occurrence of similar dualisms among other peoples. The most 

 satisfactory explanation of this phenomenon is one proposed by Miss 

 Alice C. Fletcher and Mr. Hewitt, although working independently, 

 a number of years ago, namely, that this dualism is, in brief, a drama- 

 tization of the relation of the male and the female principles of 

 nature in the forms of governmental organization. 



Mr. Hewitt also recorded in the Onondaga dialect a brief legend 

 describing the three Air- or Wind-Man-beings, or Gods ; these Gods 

 are the so-called Hofidu"i', the patrons of the Wooden-Mask With 

 the Wry-face or " False-face " Society, whose duty is the exorcism 

 of disease and sickness from the community and from the minds 

 and bodies of the people ; also a short story of the Medicine Flute ; 

 and another on the Husk-Mask Society ; and another on the Moccasin 

 Game as Used at the Wake for a Dead Chief ; these texts aggregate 

 more than 175 pages of manuscript exclusive of the materials relating 

 to the League. 



A number of fine specimens illustrative of Iroquois culture were 

 procured; these objects show a high order of art, and they consist 

 of one wooden mask, colored black (fig. 122) ; a husk mask for a 



