PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. LXIII 



Investigations during recent years, though adding details, have 

 not, with one exception, revealed anything new of importance in 

 regard to it. Two main systems can be recognised; the first may 

 be described as the Tribal, the second as the Social. In regard 

 to the Tribal organization, there is clearly a threefold di\dsion 

 into tribe, local group, and family, with also a somewhat indefinite 

 grouping of tribes possessing common interests of special nature 

 to form wider communities. 



It might be thought a simple matter to define a tribe, but 

 in reality it is difficult to do so except in somewhat general terms, 

 and great confusion has arisen owing to the fact that, not seldom, 

 writers have regarded as a tribe what is really only a local group. 

 It may be conveniently described as follows : — A tribe is composed 

 of a number of individuals speaking a common language and 

 regarded as owning a definite tract of country the boundaries of 

 which are kno-\\m to them and recognised iby the members of other 

 tribes. 



Of these two points, the first is perhaps the more important, 

 because in many cases there is, so far as ownership of land is 

 concerned, a further recognition of local ownership, though at the 

 same time this does not override the wider tribal rights. In some 

 rare cases statements have been made indicating individual 

 ownership, and even of a father parcelling out land amongst his 

 sons, but I think that these can be dismissed as the casual and 

 mistaken observations of untrained writers who judged the abori- 

 ginal from the white man's point of view, and, moreover, they 

 were statements made by natives well acquainted with the fact 

 that the white man had private property in land. It is essential 

 that the greatest caution should be exercised in aecepting evidence 

 of this nature. The natives are wonderfully quick in perceiving 

 that there are difl:'erent grades of rank and importance amongst 

 white men, and that, for example, the private possession of land 

 i^ evidently a sign of superiority. They are most apt mimics, 

 and when a native, such as the head man of a local group, tells 

 a white man that he owns certain land, the statement, as likely 

 as not, is made with the idea of impressing the former with a 

 sense of his, the native's, importance, rather than with strict 

 regard to its literal truth; and, further still, the expression 

 " owning the land," does not mean to him what it does to us. 



Amongst all the central and northern tribes there is no such 

 thing as private ownership, but at the same time there are distinct 

 loeal groups, each Avith its head man, and the latter, speaking to 

 a white man, would probably describe a given tract of country as 

 belonging to him, but in doing so he Avould only be speaking as 

 the representative of a group, and closer investigation would reveal 

 the fact that the whole tribal country was divided into sections, 



