Page:The American Indian.djvu/215

Rh injured party closed the incident and did not lead to an endless chain of murders.

Shifting eastward to the great gens area around the upper Mississippi and the Great Lakes, we find something more elaborate. In the first place, the Siouan group of tribes clustering around the Missouri had a well-developed police system which, however, had no definite relation to a gens group, but was initiated and controlled by a governing head for the whole tribal group of gentes. A further peculiarity of this is that such a government was transitory or periodical, being called into life each spring and ending with the last fall bison hunt. For the gens itself there was no judicial system other than the individual acts of its members. About the only formal procedure was one that seems genetically related to the calumet idea; for example, certain head men could wave a pipe over contending parties who were then bound to desist or to be set upon by the community.

Turning now to the Algonkin-speaking tribes occupying the greater part of the Ohio and St. Lawrence drainage, we find no trace of a police system except among a few groups in immediate contact with the Siouans. On the other hand, we seem to have a more sharply defined gens system in which the idea that the gens is responsible for the acts of a member is clearly formalized. Yet, we cannot be sure as to this, since in many cases, as, for example, among the Ojibway, where the gens lines do not correspond to the local grouping and the local group seems itself to be the judicial unit. So it may turn out that what we have here is merely an emphasized idea of the community's responsibility, a factor common in some degree to all parts of the world. The most interesting point here, however, is a highly formalized procedure which constitutes a kind of trial under the authority of the chief and the shaman. The principle of procedure is that the friends and relatives of the deceased are persuaded by gifts and speeches to forgive the offense. If they cannot be so persuaded, the prisoner is executed at once. This precise form of judicial procedure is found among the Ojibway and Micmac, with suggestions of it throughout the whole stretch of Algonkin