Blood Law
{{Short description|Traditional justice among Native Americans}}
Blood Law, in some traditional Native American communities, was the severe, usually capital punishment of certain serious crimes. The responsibility for delivering this justice has traditionally fallen to the family or clan of the victim, usually a male relative.
Description
Currently in the United States, only state and federal governments or military courts can impose the death penalty. Justice under Blood Law would be considered revenge killing or summary murder, and also could be an additional aggravating circumstance requiring the death penalty for the crime.{{CN|date=May 2025}}
Historically, a "cursory survey of the ethnohistorical literature indicates that death was the standard{{Clarify timeframe|reason=These tribes have been around for a long time, and this wording makes it sound like it could have been this way for thousands of years and/or pre-European contact or that it was a integral part of their cultures since time immemorial, but the passage cited makes it seem like this might have only been a post-contact phenomenon. IMO, the following sentences mentioning specific years is insufficient to convey the timeframe|date=April 2025}} punishment [for witchcraft] among Native American societies," including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Delaware, Hopi, Miami, Natchez, Navajo and Seneca.{{Cite book |last=Kilpatrick |first=Alan |title=The Night Has a Naked Soul - Witchcraft and Sorcery Among the Western Cherokee |date=1998 |publisher=Syracuse University Press |pages=4–6 |quote=A cursory survey of the ethnohistorical literature indicates that death was the standard punishment among Native American societies. Numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of random witch killings are recorded among the Chickasaw (Adair [1775] 1930), Natchez (Thwaites 1847, 425), the Miami (McCoy [1840], 1970, 97), and the Delaware (Miller 1994).}}{{cite journal |last1=Geertz |first1=Armin W. |title=Hopi Indian Witchcraft and Healing: On Good, Evil, and Gossip |journal=American Indian Quarterly |date= Summer 2011 |volume=35 |issue=3 |pages=372–393 |doi=10.1353/aiq.2011.a447052 |issn= 0095-182X|quote=To the Hopis, witches or evil-hearted persons deliberately try to destroy social harmony by sowing discontent, doubt, and criticism through evil gossip as well as by actively combating medicine men. ... Admitting [he practiced witchcraft] could cost him his life and occult power}}
In 1824 the western Cherokee passed new laws "forbidding the wanton killing of suspected witches".{{Cite book |last=Kilpatrick |first=Alan |title=The Night Has a Naked Soul - Witchcraft and Sorcery Among the Western Cherokee |date=1998 |publisher=Syracuse University Press |page=5 |quote='Now there is a law against it, but even last year an old woman was killed as a witch' (Swanton 1928)}} However, traditional views concerning personal or family-enforced retribution for serious crimes appear to have continued in both the Cherokee and Creek communities throughout the 19th Century, and in some communities through into the present day.
See also
References
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External links
- [https://teachinghistory.org/best-practices/examples-of-historical-thinking/23417 Cherokee Law of Blood], Teachinghistory.org
{{Cherokee|state=collapsed}}