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Kinship

American Eras

Kinship

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The Basis of Society. Kinship provided the base for any Native American society’s structure, including economics, politics, and social relations. Whom one was related to determined where one lived, whom one married, where one’s crops grew, and how one stood in relation to others in the society. Groups who depended to a significant degree upon horticulture tended to practice matrilineal kinship, meaning that one’s relatives were traced through the mother’s side of the family. The Northwest Coast groups who depended upon fishing also exercised this form of kinship. A smaller number of groups, such as some Plains Indians, practiced patrilineal descent, tracing relatives through the father’s line. Tracing ancestors and relatives through only one parent is an alien concept to most contemporary citizens of the United States, who usually see both of their parents’ families as relatives. Societies that were matrilineal did not necessarily give women a role in politics or diplomacy, but they often granted women the rights of home and land ownership. This is a significant recognition of the importance of women to the society; women in matrilineal systems generally owned the crops that they grew and thus contributed as much as (if not more than) their husbands to the subsistence economy. Moreover, women in such societies, and indeed in most Indian groups, exercised the autonomy to choose their own mates and divorce them if they desired.

Clans. Among many North American Indians, particularly the larger and more sedentary groups in the East, the Southwest, and the Northwest coast, clans were a leading, or perhaps the most important, unit of social organization. People of the same clan recognized some sort of common ancestor; that is, they were relatives. Although clans were frequently named for an animal, there was no belief that the people actually descended from such an animal. Generally, people of the same clan could

not marry one another, and a child belonged either to the clan of his mother or father. Members were spread out over several villages, and an individual could almost always find shelter and food from a member of the same clan in a different village. Where they existed, clans had different functions. In some Indian societies they owned personal names and titles, which made a particular clan responsible for certain ceremonies and political positions. Among the Creeks, for example, the Wind Clan supplied village leaders. Clan members enacted revenge upon the members of another clan who murdered one of their own. Such acts of vengeance put all members of the offending clan in danger; any relative of the murderer qualified as an appropriate target for retaliation.

Source

Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976).

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