In proportion as tribal marriage was being transformed, owing to the breaches made in it by individual instinct, the consanguineous family was gradually arising in place of the collective and fictitious family. It seems most likely that uterine filiation, or the maternal family, was first established. The Australian Motas still have filiation by the woman’s side, and among them the property of the uncle is transmitted to the uterine nephew; but already the paternal family is beginning to be constituted, and the relatives on the male side seek to redeem the heritage by means of an indemnity.[887] With other and more advanced Australian tribes, fanatical evolution is more complete; masculine filiation is already instituted, and agnation adopted; there is even a worship of the manes of male ancestors.[888] The Melanesians of Australia and Tasmania present, therefore, a tolerably complete picture of the evolution of marriage and of the family, from the primitive rape, followed by a tribal period in which marriage is merely a limited and regulated promiscuity, and in which real consanguinity is replaced by a fictitious fraternity, down to the régime of individual marriage and masculine filiation, previously passing through uterine filiation, or the maternal family. We shall find traces of this evolution among other races, but nowhere is the lower stage so well preserved as in Australia.
III. The Family in America.
Nothing similar to the gross tribal marriage of the Australian Kamilaroi is to be found among the American Indians, whose familial organisation, however, strikingly recalls that of the Melanesian clans, though already in a higher degree of evolution.
The tribes of the Redskins were, and are still, divided into phratries, which are again subdivided into clans. Now these clans are composed of real or fictitious relatives. In each phratry the corresponding clans have the same totem, and it is strictly forbidden to marry a woman belonging to the group bearing the same totem. This organisation is very ancient; it existed in Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest, and the French found it in the eighteenth century among the Redskins of Canada. The Hurons, Charlevoix tells us, were divided into three clans: the wolf, the tortoise, and the bear.[889] The totem, or emblem of the clan, served to sign treaties.[890] This is a general fact, and the subdivision of the tribe into clans or gentes is observed among the Tinneh Indians, the Choctaws, the Iroquois, the Omahas, the Indians of Columbia, etc., etc. Each clan forms one large family, inhabiting sometimes a common house, as do still the Indians of the Pueblos, as did the Iroquois at the time they were first discovered, and as did the Mexicans at the epoch of the Spanish conquest. The “long houses” of the Iroquois were buildings a hundred feet in length. A large corridor, closed at the two extremities by a door, traversed its entire length. To the right and left of this central corridor, and opening on it, were stalls, or niches, each serving as the apartment of a family. The number of these families varied from five to twenty.[891]
The members of a Redskin clan had common rights and duties. When a man died, any personal objects he might possess were deposited in his tomb, for they might be useful to him in the future life. The remaining property of the deceased belonged principally to the clan, or the gentiles; his near relatives, however, were considered first. Thus, among the Iroquois, the widow, the children, and the maternal uncles claimed the largest part, while a very small portion of the heritage came to the brothers. The general principle was that the property should remain in the clan. In the present day the old customs are modified, and with the Iroquois, the Creeks, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Crows, etc., there is no longer any gentile heritage; all passes to the children.[892]
The political organisation was, or still is, republican. The members of a Redskin clan have the right to elect and to depose the chief of the community, and the liberty to adopt strangers. They are united by a strict solidarity, and have a mutual duty to help and to avenge each other. And lastly they have their council and their sepulture in common.[893]
But the most rigorous obligation for the members of the same clan is that of not marrying in it. To take a wife having the same totem is considered as a most culpable act; it is a crime sometimes punished by death.[894] The Iroquois law regulating marriages recalls, in a certain degree, that which takes place among the Kamilaroi of Australia. Thus an Iroquois of the Seneca tribe and of the Wolf clan must not marry a woman belonging, not only to his own clan, but to all the clans of the same name in the five other tribes of the Iroquois. On the other hand, he is perfectly free to marry in any of the seven other clans of his own Seneca tribe.[895] In short, an Iroquois may be endogamous in the tribe, but he must be exogamous from the point of view of the clan or clans.
The motive of the prohibition of marriage within the clan is always the supposed relationship. Thus the law of the Tinneh Indians forbids a man of the Chitsang clan to marry a woman of the same clan because that woman is his sister.[896]
The children always belong to the gens, or clan, of their mother.
These rules vary more or less from tribe to tribe, except the prohibition of marriage within the clan, which is strict and general. Thus, among the Omahas, a man may take a wife in another tribe, even if this woman belongs to a clan of the same name as his own; but he cannot marry within his own clan, because all the women of this clan are reputed to be his relations—sisters, aunts, nieces, daughters, etc. We shall see presently to what women these various appellations, which among the Redskins have a much wider sense than with us, are applied.[897]