labours fall to the women, except the fabrication of arms. It is she who takes care of the home, who cooks, prepares the skins and the furs, gathers the wild rice, digs, sows and reaps the maize and the vegetables, dries the meat and the roots for the winter-provision, makes the clothes and the necklaces, etc. She even works at the construction of bark canoes, but in this, man comes to her aid. With that exception, he confines himself to hunting and fighting, smoking, eating, drinking, and sleeping. In his eyes work is a disgrace.[1] Such are the customs of living Redskins. Were they different last century? Not at all, if we may believe the authorities even who are invoked by the modern theorists of the American matriarchate. Charlevoix tells us that the Huron husbands prostituted their daughters and their wives for money,[2] that the Sioux cut off the noses of their unfaithful wives and scalped them,[3] and that all the hard work was left to the women, the men glorying in their idleness.[4] Lafitau enumerates, with still greater detail, the many and painful occupations of the women,[5] and he narrates the story of a husband who burnt his adulterous wife at a slow fire.[6] It is not then amongst the Redskins that we can find the matriarchate. Their familial system is none the less very curious, especially if we compare it with that of the Australians.
The familial clan of the Australians and of the Redskins enables us to retrace the origin of the ideas of kinship. Nothing similar seems to exist among the animals. In the best endowed species, the parents, especially the females, have an instinctive love of their young, but only as long as they are young. After that period they no longer recognise them, and often even drive them away.
Man, who has certainly begun his existence in the same way as the animals, has early attained, not to ideas of precise filiation, but to a vague idea of consanguinity
