Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/101



Among the Iroquois the tribal domain was held and owned b}' the tribe in common. Individual ownership, with the right to sell and convey in fee-simple to any other person, was entirely unknown among them. It required the experience and development of the two succeeding ethnical periods to bring mankind to such a knowledge of property in land as its individual ownership with the power of alienation in fee-simple implies. No person in Indian life could obtain the absolute title to land, since it was vested by custom in the tribe as one body, and they had no conception of what is implied by a legal title in severalty with power to sell and convey the fee. But he could reduce unoccupied land to possession by cultivation, and so long as he thus used it he had a possessory right to its enjoyment which would be recognized and respected by his tribe. Gardens, plantinglots, apartments in a long-house, and, at a later day, orchards of fruit were thus held by persons and by families. Such possessory right was all that was needed for their full enjoyment and for the protection of their interest in them, A person might transfer or donate his rights to other persons of the same tribe, and they also passed by inheritance, under established customs, to his gentile kin. This was substantially the Indian system in respect to the ownership of lands and apartments in houses among the Indian tribes within the areas of the United States and British America in the Lower Status of barbarism. In later times, when the State or National Government acquired Indian lands, and made compensation therefor, pa}^ment for the lands went to the tribe, and for improvements to the individual who had the possessory right. At the Tonawanda Reservation of the