Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines | Page 7

principal the gens afforded to each individual member that personal protection which no other existing power could give.
After enumerating the rights, privileges, and obligations of its members, it will be necessary to follow the gens in its organic relations to a phratry tribe and confederacy, in order to find the uses to which it was applied, the privileges which it conferred, and the principles which it fostered. The gentes of the Iroquois will be taken as the standard exemplification of this institution in the Ganowaman family. They had carried their scheme of government from the gens to the confederacy, making it complete in each of its parts, and an excellent illustration of the capabilities of the gentile organization in its archaic form.
When discovered the Iroquois were in the Lower Status of barbarism, and well advanced in the arts of life pertaining to this condition. They manufactured nets, twine, and rope from filaments of bark, wove belts and burden straps, with warp and woof from the same materials, they manufactured earthen vessels and pipes from clay mixed with silicious materials and hardened by fire, some of which were ornamented with rude medallions, they cultivated maize, beans, squashes, and tobacco in garden beds, and made unleavened bread from pounded maize, which they boiled in earthen vessels, [Footnote: These loaves or cakes were about six inches in diameter and an inch thick] they tanned skins into leather, with which they manufactured kilts leggins, and moccasins, they used the bow and arrow and war-club as their principal weapons, used flint-stone and bone implements, wore skin garments, and were expert hunters and fishermen They constructed long joint tenement houses large enough to accommodate five, ten, and twenty families, and each household practiced communism in living, but they were unacquainted with the use of stone or adobe brick in house architecture, and with the use of the native metals. In mental capacity and in general advancement they were the representative branch of the Indian family north of New Mexico General F A. Walker has sketched their military career in two paragraphs "The career of the Iroquois was simply terrific. They were the scourge of God upon the continent." [Footnote: North American Review April No. 1873 p. 360 Note.] From lapse of time the Iroquois tribes have come to differ slightly in the number and in the names of their respective gentes, the largest number being eight, as follows:
Seneca Cayuga Onondaga Oneida Mohawks Tuscarora 1 Wolf Wolf Wolf Wolf Wolf Gray Wolf 2 Bear Bear Bear Bear Bear Bear 3 Turtle Turtle Turtle Turtle Turtle Great Turtle 4 Beaver Beaver Beaver Beaver 5 Deer Deer Deer Yellow Wolf 6 Snipe Snipe Snipe Snipe 7 Heron Eel Eel Eel 8 Hawk Hawk Ball Little Turtle
These changes show that certain gentes in some of the tribes have become extinct through the vicissitudes of time, and that others have been formed by the segmentation of over full gentes.
With a knowledge of the rights, privileges, and obligations of the members of a gens, its capabilities as the unit of a social and governmental system will be more fully understood, as well as the manner in which it entered into the higher organizations of the phratry tribe, and confederacy.
The gens is individualized by the following rights, privileges, and obligations conferred and imposed upon its members, and which made up the jus gentilicium:
I The right of electing its sachem and chiefs
II The right of deposing its sachem and chiefs
III The obligation not to marry in the gens
IV Mutual rights of inheritance of the property of deceased members
V Reciprocal obligations of help, defense, and redress of injuries
VI The right of bestowing names upon its members
VII The right of adopting strangers into the gens
VIII Common religious rites
IX A common burial place.
X A council of the gens
These functions and attributes gave vitality as well as individuality to the organization and protected the personal rights of its members. Such were the rights, privileges, and obligations of the members of an Iroquois gens; and such were those of the members of the gentes of the Indian tribes generally, as far as the investigation has been carried.
For a detailed exposition of these characteristics the reader is referred to Ancient Society, pp. 72-85.
All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other's freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organized. A structure composed of such units would of necessity bear the impress of their