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Updated: July 29, 2025
Territorial unions grew up instead of the consanguine unions of old, and this new organization evidently offered many advantages under the given circumstances.
"Each consanguine relationship thus gradually surrounded the surface on which it dwelt with a number of garden plots sufficient to the wants of its members. The aggregate area thereof, including the abodes, formed the 'calpullalli' soil of the 'calpulli' and was held by it as a unit; the single tracts, however, being tilled and used for the benefit of the single families.
Women were already deposed from their former exalted position as heads of families and as leaders of consanguine communities. All their rightful prerogatives had been usurped. The highest development in Nature had become the slave of man's appetites, and motherhood, which had hitherto been accepted as the most exalted function either in heaven or on the earth, trailed in the dust.
Between the two extremes, represented by the two rules of descent, three entire ethnical periods intervene, covering many thousands of years. As intermarriage in the gens was prohibited, it withdrew its members from the evils of consanguine marriages, and thus tended to increase the vigor of the stock.
Mitsha's clan was that of Topanashka, his own maternal grandfather; and if he spoke against the union matters would be desperate. His mother, therefore, held the key to the situation, inasmuch as through her both the Eagle clan, to which Mitsha belonged, and Tanyi hanutsh, his own consanguine cluster, could be favourably or unfavourably influenced.
Since the husbands always belonged to a different consanguine group from their wives, and the children followed their mother's line of descent, the family was permanently divided. There was really no family in our sense of the word. The Indian has an individual name only. He is, in addition, distinguished by the name of his clan, which in turn has its proper cognomen.
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