SOMETHING ABOUT INDIAN SOCIAL LIFE
Mistakes of the Earliest European Visitors as to Indian Society and
Government.--How Indian Social Life originated.--The Family Tie the
Central Principle.--Gradual Development of a Family into a Tribe.--The
Totem.
The first white visitors to America found men exercising some kind of
authority, and they called them kings, after the fashion of European
government. The Spaniards even called the head-chief of the Mexicans
the "Emperor Montezuma." There was not a king, still less an emperor,
in the whole of North America. Had these first Europeans understood
that they were face to face with men of the Stone Age, that is, with
men who had not progressed further than our own forefathers had
advanced thousands of years ago, in that dim past when they used
weapons and implements of stone, and when they had not as yet anything
like written language, they would have been saved many blunders. They
would not have called native chiefs by such high-sounding titles as
"King {16} Powhatan" and "King Philip." They would not have styled the
simple Indian girl, Pocahontas, a princess; and King James, of England,
would not have made the ludicrous mistake of being angry with Rolfe for
marrying her, because he feared that when her father died, she would be
entitled to "the throne," and Rolfe would claim to be King of Virginia!
The study of Indian life has this peculiar interest, that it gives us
an insight into the thinking and acting of our own forefathers long
before the dawn of history, when they worshiped gods very much like
those of the Indians.
All the world over, the most widely separated peoples in similar stages
of development exhibit remarkably similar ideas and customs, as if one
had borrowed from the other. There is often a curious resemblance
between the myths of some race in Central Africa and those of some
heathen tribe in Northern Europe. The human mind, under like
conditions, works in the same way and produces like results. Thus, in
studying pictures of Indian life as it existed at the Discovery, we
have before us a sort of object-lesson in the condition of our own
remote ancestors.
Now, the first European visitors made serious {17} errors in describing
Indian life. They applied European standards of judgment to things
Indian. A tadpole does not look in the least like a frog. An
uninformed person who should find one in a pool, and, a few weeks
later, should find a frog there, would never imagine that the tadpole
had changed into the frog. Now, Indian society was in what we may call
the tadpole stage. It was quite unlike European society, and yet it
contained exactly the same elements as those out of which European
society gradually unfolded itself long ago.
Indian society grew up in the most natural way out of the crude
beginnings of all society. Let us consider this point for a moment.
Suppose human beings of the lowest grade to be living together in a
herd, only a little better than beasts, what influence would first
begin to elevate them? Undoubtedly, parental affection. Indeed,
mother-love is the foundation-stone of all our civilization. On that
steadfast rock the rude beginnings of all social life are built. Young
animals attain their growth and the ability to provide for themselves
very early. The parents' watchful care does not need to be long
exercised. The offspring, so soon as it is weaned, is quickly {18}
forgotten. Not so the young human being. Its brain requires a long
time for its slow maturing. Thus, for years, without its parents' care
it would perish. The mother's love is strengthened by the constant
attention which she must so long give to her child, and this is shared,
in a degree, by the father. At the same time, their common interest in
the same object draws them closer together. Before the first-born is
able to find its own food and shelter other children come, and so the
process is continually extended. Thus arises the _family_, the
corner-stone of all life that is above that of brutes.
But the little household, living in a cave and fighting hand to hand
with wild beasts and equally wild men, has a hard struggle to maintain
itself. In time, however, through the marriage of the daughters--for
in savage life the young men usually roam off and take wives elsewhere,
while the young women stay at home--instead of the original single
family, we have the grown daughters, with their husbands, living still
with their parents and rearing children, thus forming a group of
families, closely united by kinship. In the next generation, by the
same process continued, we have a dozen, perhaps twenty, families, {19}
all closely related, and living, it may be, under one shelter, the men
hunting and providing food for the whole group, and the women working
together and preparing the food in common.
Moreover, they all trace their relationship through their mothers,
because the women are the home-staying element. In our group of
families, for instance, all the women are descendants of the original
single woman with whom we began; but the husbands have come from
elsewhere. This is no doubt the reason why among savages it seems the
universal practice to trace kinship through the mother. Again, in such
a little community as we have supposed, the women, being all united by
close ties of blood, are the ruling element. The men may beat their
wives, but, after all, the women, if they join together against any one
man, can put him out and remain in possession.
These points it is important to bear in mind, because they explain what
would otherwise appear very singular features of Indian life. For
instance, we understand now why a son does not inherit anything, not so
much as a tobacco-pipe, at his father's death. He is counted as the
mother's child. For the same reason, if the {20} mother has had more
than one husband, and children by each marriage, these are all counted
as full brothers and sisters, because they have the same mother.
Such a group of families as has been supposed is called a _clan_, or in
Roman history a _gens_. It may be small, or it may be very numerous.
The essential feature is that it is a body of people united by the tie
of common blood. It may have existed for hundreds of years and have
grown to thousands of persons. Some of the clans of the Scotch
Highlands were quite large, and it would often have been a hopeless
puzzle to trace a relationship running back through many generations.
Still, every Cameron knew that he was related to all the other
Camerons, every Campbell to all the other Campbells, and he recognized
a clear duty of standing by every clansman as a brother in peace and in
war. We see thus that the clan organization grows naturally out of the
drawing together of men to strengthen themselves in the fierce struggle
of savage life. The clan is simply an extension of the family. The
family idea still runs through it, and kinship is the bond that holds
together all the members.
{21}
Now, this was just the stage of social progress that the Indians had
reached at the Discovery. Their society was organized on the basis of
the clan, and it bore all the marks of its origin.
Indians, however, have not any family names. Something, therefore, was
needed to supply the lack of a common designation, so that the members
of a clan might know each other as such, however widely they might be
scattered. This lack was supplied by the clan-symbol, called a
_totem_. This was always an animal of some kind, and an image of it
was often rudely painted over a lodge-entrance or tattooed on the
clansman's body. All who belonged to the clan of the Wolf, or the
Bear, or the Tortoise, or any other, were supposed to be descended from
a common ancestress; and this kinship was the tie that held them
together in a certain alliance, though living far apart. It mattered
not that the original clan had been split up and its fragments
scattered among several different tribes. The bond of clanship still
held. If, for example, a Cayuga warrior of the Wolf clan met a Seneca
warrior of the same clan, their totem was the same, and they at once
acknowledged each other as brothers.
{22}
Perhaps we might illustrate this peculiar relation by our system of
college fraternities. Suppose that a Phi-Beta-Kappa man of Cornell
meets a Phi-Beta-Kappa man of Yale. Immediately they recognize a
certain brotherhood. Only the tie of clanship is vastly stronger,
because it rests not on an agreement, but on a real blood relationship.
According to Indian ideas, a man and a woman of the same clan were too
near kindred to marry. Therefore a man must always seek a wife in some
other clan than his own; and thus each family contained members of two
clans.
The clan was not confined to one neighborhood. As it grew, sections of
it drifted away and took up their abode in different localities. Thus,
when the original single Iroquois stock became split into five distinct
tribes, each contained portions of eight clans in common. Sometimes it
happened that, when a clan divided, a section chose to take a new
totem. Thus arose a fresh centre of grouping. But the new clan was
closely united to the old by the sense of kinship and by constant
intermarriages. This process of splitting and forming new clans had
gone on for a long time among the Indians--for how {23} many hundreds
of years, we have no means of knowing. In this way there had arisen
groups of clans, closely united by kinship. Such a group we call a
_phratry_.
A number of these groups living in the same region and speaking a
common dialect constituted a larger union which we sometimes call a
_nation_, more commonly a _tribe_.
This relation may be illustrated by the familiar device of a
family-tree, thus:
[Illustration: Indian Family Tree.]
{24} Here we see eleven clans, all descended from a common stock and
speaking a common dialect, composing the Mohegan Tribe. Some of the
smaller tribes, however, had not more than three clans.
The point that we need to get clear in our minds is that an Indian
tribe was simply a huge family, extended until it embraced hundreds or
even thousands of souls. In many cases organization never got beyond
the tribe. Not a few tribes stood alone and isolated. But among some
of the most advanced peoples, such as the Iroquois, the Creeks, and the
Choctaws, related tribes drew together and formed a confederacy or
league, for mutual help. The most famous league in Northern America
was that of the Iroquois. We shall describe it in the next chapter.
It deserves careful attention, both because of its deep historical
interest, and because it furnishes the best-known example of Indian
organization.
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