the Iroquois, the Creeks, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Crows, etc., there is no longer any gentile heritage; all passes to the children.[1]
The political organisation was, or still is, republican. The members of a Redskin clan have the right to elect and to depose the chief of the community, and the liberty to adopt strangers. They are united by a strict solidarity, and have a mutual duty to help and to avenge each other. And lastly they have their council and their sepulture in common.[2]
But the most rigorous obligation for the members of the same clan is that of not marrying in it. To take a wife having the same totem is considered as a most culpable act; it is a crime sometimes punished by death.[3] The Iroquois law regulating marriages recalls, in a certain degree, that which takes place among the Kamilaroi of Australia. Thus an Iroquois of the Seneca tribe and of the Wolf clan must not marry a woman belonging, not only to his own clan, but to all the clans of the same name in the five other tribes of the Iroquois. On the other hand, he is perfectly free to marry in any of the seven other clans of his own Seneca tribe.[4] In short, an Iroquois may be endogamous in the tribe, but he must be exogamous from the point of view of the clan or clans.
The motive of the prohibition of marriage within the clan is always the supposed relationship. Thus the law of the Tinneh Indians forbids a man of the Chitsang clan to marry a woman of the same clan because that woman is his sister.[5]
The children always belong to the gens, or clan, of their mother.
These rules vary more or less from tribe to tribe, except the prohibition of marriage within the clan, which is strict and general. Thus, among the Omahas, a man may take a wife in another tribe, even if this woman belongs to a clan of the same name as his own; but he cannot marry within his own clan, because all the women of this clan are
