The council would meet and decide what punishment should be for a wrongdoer, such as if one committed murder and they decided he should die also, the chief would tell him. So having no jail, he would be free until his time came. Time was measured by the moon. The council would decide how many moons he had left. Then the criminal would return to meet his execution and if he did not return, his mother or father or brother or his son would have to pay for his crime, someone very close to him. Now in the killing of one in a brawl, the living was not punished by death. He had to see that the family of the deceased was fed and clothed until all were capable of taking care of themselves. If he had only enough for one family, he had to do without, so the dead man’s family would not suffer hunger. Now if a squaw committed adultery, she was punished by cutting the tip of her nose. She would be forever marked as an unfaithful squaw. There is no punishment known today for the man. Once an Indian had an eye sore the medicine man could not cure. So he had to go into a coma and seek the aid of the Great Spirit. After the preparation that the Great Spirit had instructed them to do, he passed out, so to speak. The Great Spirit told him where to find the herb that would cure any sore eye. It seems that the chief’s little girl had died and was buried. The Great Spirit told him to go to the grave of this little girl, and he will find a small vine growing from her eye. Use that vine and leaves, and make an eye wash with it. He did and the eyes were cured (and we were still using it till we were forbidden by the medical association to use any herb), and many herbs were found, like moner, and until today only one of the tribe knows the herbs that were used since the beginning, which will not be revealed to anyone. The Indians of today do not meet the standard that the Great Spirit set, nor will they follow the ritual that goes with it, so it will die out just like the other things the white man deprived the Indians of, their way of living. The chief duty was to see that everyone had something to eat before he would eat. If some did not have any through no fault of their own, everyone had to share what they had with the one that had none. These were the unwritten laws that the Chitimacha lived by. As far as this writer knows that is the way it was related a long time ago. (I make no excuse for adding some or leaving some of it out. As time goes on, perhaps some more will come to mind. If so, it will be added to this brief resume of the one and only Great Spirit as the Indians knew him before the white man came.)