The essential feature of the kinship terminology is the reckoning from ego, whereby each individual remembers his own relation to every other member of the clan or tribe; and commonly the kinship terms are classific rather than descriptive (i.e., a single term expresses the relation which in English is expressed by the phrase "My elder brother's second son's wife"). The system is curiously complex and elaborate. It was not discovered by the earlier and more superficial observers of the Indians, and was brought out chiefly by Morgan, who detected numerous striking examples among different tribes; but it would appear that the system is not equally complete among all of the tribes, probably because of immature development in some cases and because of decadence in others.
The system of ordination, like that of kinship, is characterized by reckoning from the ego and by adventitious associations. It may have been developed from the kinship system through the need for recognition and assignment of adopted captives, collective property, and other things pertaining to the group; yet it bears traces of influence by the taboo system. Its ramifications are wide: In some cases it emphasizes kinship by assigning members of the family group to fixed positions about the camp-fire or in the house; this function develops into the placement of family groups in fixed order, as exemplified in the Iroquoian long-house and the Siouan camping circle; or it develops into a curiously exaggerated direction-concept culminating in the cult of the Four Quarters and the Here, and this prepares the way for a quinary, decimal, and vigesimal numeration; this last branch sends off another in which the cult of the Six Quarters and the Here arises to prepare the way for the mystical numbers 7, 13, and 7x7, whose vestiges come down to civilization; both the four-quarter and the six-quarter associations are sometimes bound up with colors; and there are numberless other ramifications. Sometimes the function and development of these curious concepts, which constitute perhaps the most striking characteristic of prescriptorial culture, are obscure at first glance, and hardly to be discovered even through prolonged research; yet, so far as they have been detected and interpreted, they are especially adapted to fixing demotic relations; and through them the manifold relations of individuals and groups are crystallized and kept in mind.
Thus the American Indians, including the Siouan stock, are made up of families organized into clans or gentes, and combined in tribes, sometimes united in confederacies, all on a basis of kinship, real or assumed; and the organization is shaped and perpetuated by a series of devices pertaining to the plane of prescriptorial culture, whereby each member of the organization is constantly reminded of his position in the group.
Footnotes
Prepared as a complement and introduction to the following paper oil "Siouan Sociology," by the late James Owen Dorsey.
"A synopsis of the Indian tribes ... in North America," Trans, and Coll. Am. Antiq. Soc., vol. II, p. 120.
"Indian linguistic families of America north of Mexico," Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, for 1885-86 (1891), pp. 111-118. Johnson's Cyclopedia, 1893-95 edition, vol. VII, p. 546, etc.
Correspondence with the Bureau of Ethnology.