Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/310

 warrior who is taken prisoner is dishonoured and held as dead by his tribe, and his captors generally torture him to death. However, in the last century, the most ferocious of the Redskins, the Iroquois, sometimes spared a few prisoners to offer them to the wives or daughters whose relations had been killed. The latter had the power either to put them to death, in order that their shades might serve as slaves to their father, brother, or husband, etc., who had fallen, or to pardon them, and even adopt them. In this last case, the enemies of the previous night took a place among the warriors of the clan, and were no longer distinguished from the others.

This system of kinship in the familial clan is curious, because it holds real consanguinity very cheap, unhesitatingly confusing real with fictitious kinship, and thus forming classes of fictitious relations. It seems to prove the existence of an ancient period of promiscuity, during which there was scarcely any thought of determining with precision the degrees of consanguinity of individuals. Naturally, the first form of the family which was more or less vaguely outlined in the confused groups anterior to the familial clans, was the maternal family; but this system of filiation by classes is in no way incompatible with paternal filiation.

Up to the present time kinship in the female line prevails among most of the Redskin tribes. Certain of them, however, are evolving in the direction of masculine filiation, and this movement was already commencing at the close of the last century. The transformation began with the chiefs and more powerful men. Among the Thlinkits of Russian America the great men already give the paternal name to their children; but the poorer people are still in the stage of uterine filiation. Certain tribes have quite recently adopted the system of paternal filiation. It is owing to European influence that this change is operating, and its accomplishment is only a question of time. The Ojibways have only taken two generations to effect the adoption of agnatic filiation. A similar evolution