considered worthy of account. The primitive family was maternal, for in the confusion of sexual unions paternal filiation would have been difficult to determine; no importance was therefore attached to it in early times, and the father was not looked upon as the parent of his children.
We shall find the maternal family, or at least traces of it, in many countries, but it is especially among the Indians of North America that it has been the best preserved and the best studied. In the eighteenth century it was already remarked by Charlevoix, Lafitau, and Lahontan,[1] that the Redskins always bear the name of their mother, and that it is through a man's sister that his name is transmitted to descendants. The American clan is based on uterine filiation; it comprehends all the descendants, in the female line of an ancestral mother, real or hypothetical. It is therefore exactly the contrary of the agnatic gens of the Greco-Roman world.
The Redskin clan is composed of all the families reputed to be related to each other; it is a little republic having the right to the service of all the women for the cultivation of the soil, and of all the men for the chase, war, and vendettas. It is to the woman that the wigwam or family dwelling belongs, as well as all the objects possessed by the family, and the whole is transmitted by heritage, not to the son, but to the eldest daughter or to the nearest maternal relative,[2] sometimes to the brother of the deceased woman. Nevertheless, this heritage must be understood in the sense of a simple usufruct. It was the maternal clan in reality who was the proprietor, and none of the members of the community could seriously alienate the social property. The husband alone, in most of the tribes, had no right over the goods or over the children; they all remained in the maternal clan;[3] it was maternal filiation which regulated the name, the rank,and the hereditary rights in the clan.[4] A sort of communism reigned there. All the provisions, whether they were the produce of the soil, of the chase, or of fishing, were placed in public storehouses, under the control of an aged matron; and if it ever happened that a family had
