Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney

by the Seneca more than fifty years ago. A somewhat similar story is related by Adair (Hist. American Indians, p. 392) of a young "Anantooeah" (i. e., Nûndawegi or Seneca) warrior taken by the Shawano. Death song--It seems to have been a chivalrous custom among the eastern tribes to give to the condemned prisoner who requested it a chance to recite his warlike deeds and to sing his death song before proceeding to the final torture. He was allowed the widest latitude of boasting, even at the expense of his captors and their tribe. The death song was a chant belonging to the warrior himself or to the war society of which he was a member, the burden being farewell to life and defiance to death. When the great Kiowa war chief, Set-ängya, burst his shackles at Fort Sill and sprang upon the soldiers surrounding him, with the deliberate purpose to sell his life rather than to remain a prisoner, he first sang the war song of his order, the Kâitseñ'ko, of which the refrain is: "O earth, you remain forever, but we Kâitseñ'ko must die" (see the author's Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, in Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau American Ethnology, part 1, 1901).