Age-Societies of the Plains Indians 



By ROBERT H. LOWIE 



Since 1899, when Dr. A. L. Kroeber, now of the University of California, began his researches among tlie 

 Arapaho, the department of anthropology of the American Museum has been almost continuously engaged 

 in an investigation of Plains Indian organizations. Under the curatorship of Dr. Clark Wissler the 

 field was parceled out among different members of the staff. Dr. Wissler himself devoting his attention 

 to the Oglala, tlie Blackfoot and the Pawnee (tlie last with the aid of Mr. James A. Murie, a chief of the 

 tribe), while to Mr. Alanson Skinner were allotted the Plains Ojibwa and several Southern Siouan 

 tribes, to Dr. Pliny E. Goddard the Sarcee, and to the present writer more particularly the Crow, Hidatsa 

 and Mandan, as well as a number of other tribes imperfectly known in this particular respect. After years 

 of labor this work has now drawn to a conclusion and the final paper of a thousand-page volume is 

 being issued under the title Plains Indian Age-Societies : Historical and Comparative Summary. Some 

 of the more general results may be of more than merely technical interest. — The Author 



4GE-S0CIETIP:S occur, strictly speak- 

 /\ iug, among only five of the Plains 

 J V tribes, the Hidatsa, Manclau, Black- 

 foot, Arapaho, and Gros Ventre, and the 

 system of the first-named may be taken as 

 typical. Among the Hidatsa the entire male 

 population was divided into about ten so- 

 cieties, each composed of men or boys of 

 about the same age. An individual did not 

 belong to a society automatically by virtue 

 of his years, however ; rather was he obliged 

 to buy membership in company with his age- 

 mates. Thus, young boys of, say, ten would 

 not form any organization, but as they grew 

 up would come to covet membership in the 

 lowest grade, the Stone Hammer Society, 

 then held by their immediate seniors. That 

 is, they desired to possess the privilege of 

 performing a certain dance, of wearing the 

 distinctive regalia of the organization, and 

 exercising whatever other prerogatives were 

 bound up with the native notions concern- 

 ing the Stone Hammers. In order to con- 

 summate their wishes, they dispatched gifts 

 to the older boys, whom they humbly ad- 

 dressed as "fathers," and these attempted 

 to fix as high a purchasing price as they 

 were able to extort. For possibly ten or 

 even twenty nights the members of the 

 younger group were obliged to feast the 

 sellers and give presents of blankets and 

 horses, and when the older group had made 

 the requisite paraphernalia and conveyed 

 necessary instructions to the buyers, the 

 purchase was considered complete. The 

 youuger boys then paraded about the village 

 with their newly acquired badges and per- 

 formed the newly learned dance, while the 

 "fathers" merely acted as musicians — and 

 thereafter had no more rights to Stone Ham- 

 mer membership. It was now the turn of 

 the older boys to purchase entrance into the 

 next grade by going through essentially the 

 same rigmarole, and so on throughout the 

 entire scheme of organizations. 



One problem in particular aroused the in- 

 terest of students in connection with this 

 institution. What is the relation of the age 

 factor to purchase ? Organizations founded 



purely on age would not involve any en- 

 trance fee; on the other hand, if the pur- 

 chase were essential, why Avere fellow-mem- 

 bers always of the same age? It would seem 

 plausible that on that assumption a Avell-to- 

 do youth might rapidly acquire one member- 

 ship after another until he had attained to 

 the highest rank. This puzzle becomes all 

 the more pressing when we find that the 

 organizations graded by age among the five 

 peoples mentioned occur among other Plains 

 tribes without any grading or age qualifi- 

 cation, but that the purchase occurs only 

 with the age factor, although it would seem 

 that these two elements were mutually con- 

 tradictory. 



One of the first points that became clear 

 as the investigation progressed was that any 

 particular society was not essentially con- 

 nected with a particular age even though 

 all the members were age-mates. That is to 

 say, it appeared that while, say, in 18-10 all 

 the individuals in the Dog Society were 

 forty-five years old, in 1860 they may have 

 averaged sixty in the same tribe, and per- 

 haps only thirty elsewhere. The astonishing 

 fact also came to light, that one and the 

 same group might simultaneously hold sev- 

 eral memberships. In 1910 an old Hidatsa 

 informant still considered himself a mem- 

 ber of a society he had joined at seven, of 

 another he had entered at twenty, of a third 

 he had joined at twenty-seven, and of a 

 fourth he had purchased at about forty-five. 

 Similar statements were obtained from 

 other witnesses, and they were uniformly 

 accompanied by the explanation that a man 

 had a right to every society he had eve? 

 bought which for some reason he had never 

 sold. This seemed to establish definitely the 

 predominance of the purchase notion. If 

 the societies had any direct relation with 

 age, it was absurd to assume that a group 

 or individual could be simultaneously con- 

 nected with several groups. 



Nevertheless this could not be the whole 

 story, since the age of all the members of 

 a society at a particular period was practi- 

 cally uniform in spite of the variations in age 



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