THE CONSTITUTION OF THE FIVE NATIONS JJ 



You must not go unless the invitation is official. A woman shall 

 first come to you early tomorrow morning who will be the first to 

 see you, then you shall cut and prepare some elderberry twigs. 1 

 You shall cut them into pieces and remove the heart pulp and 

 then you shall string them up." " Then the lord (Royaner) shall 

 send a messenger to you to invite you, but you must not accept 

 the invitation until he shall send to you a string of twigs similar 

 to your own." 



Then Hahyonhwatha went on his journey and found the hut 

 beside the cornfield and built a fire, and in the morning a woman 

 came to the cornfield and saw the smoke from the fire at the end 

 of the cornfield and when she arrived there she saw a man sitting 

 with his head hanging down. Then the woman hurried home and 

 went straightway to where the lord (Royaner) lived and when she 

 arrived she told him that she had seen a strange man sitting beside 

 a fire in the cornfield. 



Then the lord asked her : " What thing was this man doing 

 there?" And the woman answered and said that the man was 

 sitting there quietly looking on the ground. 2 



Then the lord said : " This must be the man who sent the mes- 

 sage of the Good Tidings of Peace and Power. I shall therefore 

 now send a messenger to bring him hither." 



He then summoned the chief warrior and the deputy chief war- 

 rior to come to him and when the two had come, the lord said to 

 them : " You shall go after the man who is at the fire in the corn- 

 field and bring him to me. The lord then said to the deputy chief 

 warrior : " I send you to go after him," and the deputy chief 

 warrior went to bring this man, and when he arrived at the place 

 where the man had built the fire, he saw a man sitting there and 

 he was looking at a string of elderberry twigs which was hanging 

 on a pole horizontally placed in front of him. 



Then the deputy chief warrior said : " I am sent after you by 

 the lord (Royaner)." 



The man did not answer and so the deputy chief warrior repeated 

 the message of the lord three times, but the man did not give any 



1 Wampum at first seems to have been any kind of cylindrical bead, large 

 or small. The Mohawk name is o'tgo'rha; Seneca, o'tko'a'. The quills of 

 feathers and porcupines were used as wampum (o'tgo'rha). Indeed Baptist 

 Thomas, an Onondaga informant, says porcupine quills were used and not 

 elderberry twigs as stated in this version. 



2 Hiawatha kept repeating the phrase, asanatcik, meaning, they should give 

 me a wampum token. 



