Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/26

 its theoretical constitution and practical workings can be investigated more successfully than in the historical gentes of the Greeks and Romans. In fact, to understand fully the gentes of the latter nations a knowledge of the functions and of the rights, privileges, and obligations of the members of the American Indian gens is imperatively necessary.

In American ethnography tribe and clan have been used in the place of gens as equivalent terms from not perceiving the universality of the latter. In previous works, and following my predecessors, I have so used them. A comparison of the Indian clan with the gens of the Greeks and Romans reveals at once their identity in structure and functions. It also extends to the phratry and tribe. If the identity of these several organizations can be shown, of which there can be no doubt, there is a manifest propriety in returning to the Latin and Grecian terminologies, which are full and precise as well as historical.

The plan of government of the American aborigines commenced with the gens and ended with the confederacy, the latter being the highest point to which their governmental institutions attained. It gave for the organic series: first, the gens, a body of consanguinei having a common gentile name; second, the phratry, an assemblage of related gentes united in a higher association for certain common objects; third, the tribe, an assemblage of gentes, usually organized in phratries, all the members of which spoke the same dialect; and fourth, a confederacy of tribes, the members of which respectively spoke dialects of the same stock language. It resulted in a gentile society (societas) as distinguished from a political society or state (civitas). The difference between the two is wide and fundamental. There was neither a political society, nor a citizen, nor a state, nor any civilization in America when it was discovered. One entire ethnical period intervened between the highest American Indian tribes and the beginning of civilization, as that term is properly understood.

The gens, though a very ancient social organization founded upon kin, does not include all the descendants of a common ancestor. It was for the reason that when the gens came in marriage between single pairs was unknown, and descent through males could not be traced with certainty. Kindred were linked together chiefly through the bond of their maternity.