Page:The American Indian.djvu/205

Rh of a moiety that disregards the gens or clan, we have the Fox and Kickapoo tribes, each of which has gentile groups; but membership in the moieties is determined arbitrarily when the child is named, so that the members of a given gens will be divided between the two. In this dual grouping of tribes, we are dealing with a curious phenomenon which is not yet well understood. It is almost universal in the southern half of the eastern maize area, the eastern half of the bison area, and extends well down into the area of intense culture, if indeed not to its extreme borders. The data we have at hand seem to justify the conclusion that a moiety is not merely a larger division of clan or gentile groups, but a grouping of another kind. This is clearly the case among the Sauk and Fox where children at birth are assigned, regardless of their gens, to one of two moieties whose only function seems to be pleasurable social rivalry in certain games. Something like this is found in the southern part of the eastern maize area and has been reported from the Jicarilla Apache. The precise distribution of this custom cannot be stated, but something very much like it has been noted among the western Eskimo.

If these dual divisions were entirely for sport and ceremonies, their origin and function would be intelligible, but the problem is complicated by the presence of exogamous regulations. For example, among the Iroquois, the dual divisions, or moieties, are the phratries and were formerly exogamous, so that one must not only marry out of his clan, but out of his moiety. It is not clear, therefore, whether the mere fact of dual division is significant or just accidental. Until the whole subject is searchingly analyzed, we cannot deal with it in a work of this kind. The present tendency is to regard it as in the main accidental and to consider the exogamous character of moieties mere extensions of the system regulating marriage.

In the older literature of our subject, special significance was given the fact that among certain peoples the term father or mother was extended to include uncles, and brother or sister