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Updated: June 7, 2025
The Grecian gens, phratry, and tribe, the Roman gens, curia, and tribe find their analogues in the gens, phratry, and tribe of the American aborigines. In like manner the Irish sept, the Scottish clan, the phratra of the Albanians, and the Sanskrit ganas, without extending the comparison further, are the same as the American Indian gens, which has usually been called a clan.
II. Spanish Phratry. Gentes 5. Raccoon. 6. Spanish. 7. Royal. 8. Hush-ko'-ni. 9. Squirrel 10. Alligator. 11 Wolf. 12. Blackbird. A very complete illustration of the manner in which phratries are formed by natural growth through the subdivision of gentes is presented by the organization of the Mohegan tribe. It had three original gentes, the Wolf, the Turtle, and the Turkey.
This at least is a plausible reason for such an unnatural practice among a people so unquestionably child-lovers. The Marquesans had no totemism to save them. There were no exogamous taboos. The tribe or clan was the chief unit, not the family. The phratry tie was stronger than that of the father and mother.
The ownership of the great bulk of the property inheres in the clan, such as their houses, their patches of land, the food raised from the soil, and the game caught in the chase. Sometimes the clans are grouped, two or more constituting a phratry, and then there are other officers or chiefs standing between the clan and tribal authority.
This prohibition tends to show that the gentes of each phratry were subdivisions of an original gens and therefore the prohibition against marrying into a person's own gens had followed to its subdivisions. This restriction however was long since removed except with respect to the gens of the individual.
This conclusion is further substantiated by the statements of one of the oldest members of the Kokop phratry who frequently visited me while the excavations were in progress. The destruction of Sikyatki and its consequent abandonment doubtless occurred before the Spaniards obtained a foothold in the country.
We may thus see how naturally the Grecian phratry, prior to civilization, assumed the principal though not exclusive management of cases of murder, and also of the purification of the murderer if he escaped punishment, and after the institution of political society with what propriety the phratry assumed the duty of prosecuting the murderer in the courts of justice.
In all alike the gens, phratry and tribe were the first three stages of organization. The confederacy followed as the fourth. But it does not appear, either among the Grecian or Latin tribes in the Later Period of barbarism, that it became more than a loose league for offensive and defensive purposes.
+424+. Whether the clan or the phratry preceded in time it is hardly possible to determine clans may have united to form a larger group, or an original group may have been divided into clans. But in the latter case this original group was practically a clan, so that the question of precedence in time is not important.
The same institution in essential features and in character, it presents the organization in its archaic form and with its archaic functions. A knowledge of the Indian phratry is necessary to an intelligent understanding of the Grecian and the Roman.
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