Blood Law, in some traditional Native American communities, is 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.
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.
Historically, a "cursory survey of the ethnohistorical literature indicates that death was the standard punishment [for witchcraft] among Native American societies,"[1] including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Delaware, Hopi, Miami, Natchez, Navajo and Seneca.[1][2]
In 1824 the western Cherokee passed new laws "forbidding the wanton killing of suspected witches".[3] 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,[3] and in some communities through into the present day.[1][2]
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).
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
'Now there is a law against it, but even last year an old woman was killed as a witch' (Swanton 1928)
