The league of the Iroquois and other legends : from the Indian muse

312 NOTES.
Note 48. " The snowy parchment dressed and wrong /if. Page 177.
From great Skan-o-do's hairy hide."
" The practice of the North American tribes, of drawing figures and pictures
on skins, trees and various other substances, has been noticed by travelers and
writers from the earliest times. * * These figures represent ideas whole ideas,
and their relation on a scroll, or bark, or tree, or rock, discloses a continuity of
ideas. * * Picture-writing is, indeed, the literature of the Indian. It cannot
be interpreted, however rudely, without letting one know what the red mi i
thinks and believes." H. K. SCHOOLCRAFT, Vol. I. p. 333.
" They love to speak in a symbolical manner, all their symbols being drawn
from the realm of nature. * * I once saw a Buffalo hide covered with figures iu
the style of children's drawings, which represented battles, treaties of peace,
and other such events ;
the sun and the moou, trees and mountains, and rivers,
fish and birds, and all kinds of animals, having their part iu the delineations."
Homes of the New World, p. 47.
Note 49. " In. cares of State, .as woman should Page 179.
Should woman have her part and place."
" The history of the world shows that it is one of the tendencies of bravery to
cause woman to be respected, and to assume her proper rank and influence in society.
This was strikingly manifest in the history of the Iroquois. They are
the only tribes in America, north or south, so far as we have any accounts, who
gave to women a conservative power in their deliberations. The Iroquois matrons
had their representatives in the public councils ;
and they exercised a negative,
or what we call a veto power, in the important question of the declaration
of war. They had the right also to interfere in bringing about a peace."
H. E. SCHOOLCRAFT, Vol. III. p. 195.
Tradition says that at the great Council, which resulted in the formation of the
League, the women attended, and it preserves the name of Ja-go-sa-sa The
Wild Cat as a woman of unusual power that took part in its deliberations ;
and
to whose insight and judgment, as we may infer, is due the liberal provisions of
this forest-government in favor of tho equal rights of the sexes.
Note 50. "In her all titled lineage, Page I7.
Through her the sachem's kingly line."
" Not the least remarkable among their institutions, was that which coufineo
the transmission of the titles, rights and property in the female line to the exclusion
of the male. * * If the Deer tribe of the Cayugas, for example, received
a sachemship at the original distribution of these offices, the descent of such
title being limited to the female line, it could never pass out of the tribr. * ;
By the operation of this principle, also, the certainty of descent in the tribe c.
their principal chiefs, was secured ly a rule infallible; for the child must be the
son of its mother, although not necessarily of the mother's husband."
League of the Iroqtioitt, p. 84.