Retaliation.

Blood revenge was a process that many Native American groups used to resolve the animosities that resulted when one individual killed another. Blood revenge was, as one scholar called it, "the foundation of most [Indian] legal systems, the solder which holds together the social structure." This practice has also been called the lex talionis, Latin for the law of retaliation. In the Mosaic law of the Old Testament blood revenge was described as an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." However the lex talionis was far more complicated than the scripture implies. The law of blood revenge was grounded in the clan structure of a Native American society. In other words, the killing was not an act against the public but a private matter between the clans of the victim and the assailant. The killing created...