Furthermore, there is the further theoretical consideration of the pattern's relative duration as a cultural continuum of custom. Peter Doctor.] The ancients say that muskrat is like any other herbal medicine that you want. We present all the modern cases and then the earlier cases from the literature, historically upstream.
CASES Modern Cases
Abbie didn't know the reason for the experiment and seemed unwilling to discuss it further. 34;Sam Parker of the Tonawanda Reservation hanged himself because he thought he had killed two people." In the wake of the tragedy, the family had gone to an alacrosse game in Buffalo, leaving Katherine at home to care for six young children.
MISCELLANEOUS MODERN TYPES Case 10.— A Tuscarora Maid of the Mists, circa 1890
The young people have a chance to meet each other and to escape the scrutiny of their neighbors at home in the slums of the city. Dennison M.isa Senecamale of 33 years (1935), almost full blood. He lives when he is at home with his elderly mother in the longhouse. He is the biggest wanderer of three wandering brothers, and when he is at home he shares a workshop in the barn with his half-brother Cephas. self-carving and archery tools.
He seldom goes out when he is at home, and I have never seen him with the reservation of other young men at the society's dancing and singing gatherings. His misanthropic temper shows at home where, his brother says, he sometimes hides upstairs. One of the park rangers saw him staggering towards the Falls and took off after him.
Abbie Brooks told the nurse she didn't want to live: "I want to die." During the time when Lucy might have been transferred to hospital with a fair chance of recovery, she consistently refused to go, saying she didn't want to. I obtained this information from a trusted neighbor whom I sent to talk to the girl about going to the hospital, and this explanation was currently given about the long-term housing facility.
Early travelers and missionaries to the Iroquois tribes recorded cases of suicide that fell under their observation, which are significant.
ETHNOLOGY
EARLY CASES OF ROOT POISONING: TYPE A
His wife and family, however, tired of the commotion that surrounded them, packed up their things, despite what he might say, and left. Cicut was also in use at Onondaga, according to the botanist Pursh, who visited Onondaga Castle in the summer of 1807 during his botanical excursion through New York. Mayajpple poisonings. The sources for the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century are disappointing where we expect them to be rich.
Kalm in 1748 and 1750 visited the Iroquois country and does not mention poisonous roots in use among the Indians (Bartram, 1895; Kalm, 1937); . both neglect to mention the common may-apple, Podophyllumpeltatum L., which grows widely from Virginia to Lake Ontario, and only Kalm recorded a variety of water lock {Cicuta ramis bulbiferus) growing in the low country west of Lake Champlain, but he does not connect the plant . with the Indians. About two o'clock in the afternoon a runner from there, who was passing through the town to inform the female villains further of his death, notified the shocking event. The Huron name, and the baron was markedly impressed by the steadfastness of the Iroquois woman, who struck this root to follow her diminished husband.
Lahontang gives the impression that the usual order among the Hurons (?) was for the spouse to commit suicide within a few months of the death of the first spouse, and especially when the survivor had dreamed of the deceased spouse more than once. But if the surviving party dreams about the deceased only once, they say, the spirit of the dreams was not sure that the dead person was uncomfortable in the land of souls, because he only passed by without returning , and for that reason they think they are not supposed to keep him company. We can compare their stories and try to equate the indigenous terms with modern remains in the same or related languages, which has yielded little due to linguistic deviations or changes in terminology.
Elsewhere, when he writes about the unequal position of souls in the afterlife according to the manner of their death, he cites a specific case that occurred in the experience of a missionary brother.
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These cases may be the prototypes of the suicidal patterns we have discussed, which were probably current as well. However, there is the possibility that the Hurons may have introduced the custom among the Senecas who adopted some of them after 1648. This man puts it to his lips [a common Iroquois method of identifying roots], and without giving another answer to the Father, exclaims to his comrades, "Socha one is dead, he has eaten aconite; letus go get his body." They leave their fishing there, they run in a hurry;.
Writing in the same relation (LeJeune's relation of 1637), Le-Mercier describes the death of Saronhes, Louis de Sainte-Fois, the principal native convert of the Huron town of Ihonatiria, who had markedly betrayed them by gambling on an island near Kebec. . This is how they say it happened: One day, when he was alone in his hut with one of his little daughters, he sent her to get a certain root which they call Ondachienroa, which is a quick poison. It is clear that the good father was a little piqued by the unchristian manner of his death.
Brebeu implies that in the afterlife no distinction is made between the souls of suicides and the ordinary dead, and cites evidence that the distinction is burial, and that no punishment awaits the unfaithful in the afterlife. And so they make no distinction between good and evil, virtuous and wicked; and they equally honor the change of both, even as we have seen in the case of a young man who had poisoned himself from the grief he felt because his wife had been taken from him. It is my belief, after an analysis of the sources and the linguistic terms, that the root of the suicide referred to in these cases is
In Case 23, to which LeMercier was not an eyewitness, there is an implication that the root may have been boiled into a medicine taken internally.
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Seneca advised Waugh to cut out the part of the root where the root branches branch, because it contains poison, and use the rest of the root, harvested in the spring before the plant flowers (Waugh, 1912, vol. The great similarity between the seventeenth century spelling of the term Onon-daga, honachinra , for Cicuta, and the spelling of the Huron word, ondachiera, taken together with the modern Mohawk, onasa'-ra, corrects the matter, for the resemblance is clear even between the seventeenth-century term, *onahwensta', and the modem Onondaga. But the haughty Iroquois rejected the good fathers and prepared in their own way by singing the Song of Death.^* He who stabs himself to escape torture is severely condemned.
A charitable person having thrown a knife into their prison, having the less courage of the two, plunged it into his breast and died of the wound. Here we have a Miami captive bound for certain tortures at Onondaga, who twice attempted to swallow stones during the voyage, and thereby rob his captors of the honor of bringing him in. the village.
A friendly Huron, who had previously been adopted there, slipped a knife on his tribesman on the way to the village. Determined to get rid of the sudden death—and one that was too gentle, in my opinion—thousands of deaths before my eyes. In the beginning of the month of April, Scandaouati, the ambassador of Onnontaeronnon who had remained here as a hostage, disappeared, and our Hurons thought he had fled; but a few days later the corpses were found in the middle of the wood, not far from the village where he lived.
It is difficult to decide whether his motive was shame at the great dishonor the Mohawk had done to the League, or fear of the almost certain retaliatory torture his Huron confederates would seek, or whether the motive was vanity, as Wisse (1933 , p. 172) ) suggests.
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EXPLANATION OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN TABLE
ANALYSIS, DISTRIBUTIONS, AND CONCLUSIONS
We have, however, no accurate measure, including genealogies for the recent generations of Senecas, of the extent of intermarriage; but it is probable that before 1700 we are dealing with thoroughbreds. Children today are rarely punished, and we find the historical explanation of the customary parental attitude in the seventeenth century fear that they might kill themselves by taking a poisonous herb, usually Cicuta, or, less often, shoot or hang themselves . Suicide becomes an escape for the lower and upper generations from the abuse of the middle generation.
For some of them, love for the dead may have been a primary cause, but whether they actually believed they could follow the dead into the spirit world is irrelevant to the actual act which was more likely motivated by a fixation on the dead, supported by the faith of the Iroquois. in the coercive power of the dead over the living. At this time, the Society of the Chanters for the dead is still active to free the spirit of the survivor from any compulsion to follow the dead. The recent Type B suicides to escape the consequences of violent murder, either through punishment or bloodshed, are the modern variants of the old seventeenth-century pattern of avoiding martyrdom.
The suicides of the sick parallel the previous cases as efforts to avoid or shorten a painful death. Here are a number of examples from the years of the Huron smallpox epidemics: A sick Huron who stabbed himself twice and then swallowed an awl (Case 35); and related suicides of the elderly (case 27). This type of suicide is not typical of the Iroquois, at least according to current evidence.
Hanging was a favorite method with the Algonquin tribe and among the Mi'kmaq of the Gaspe (Le Clercq, 1910, p. 247), along with drowning which was. We are left, then, with the conclusion that suicide by taking a poisonous root is a feature of Iroquois culture that we have not been able to extract from any other ethnic group outside the area in which the Huron-Iroquois tribes lived in the seventeenth century. However, we may ask whether the belief that the souls of suicides are banished from the land of the dead is aboriginal.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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