OF THE HUMAN FAMILY. 245 



are represented in the Table. The system of relationship of the former nation was 

 furnished by Mr. Gibbs, that of the latter was obtained by the author from an 

 Okinaken woman at Red River Settlement. Both schedules are incomplete. If 

 an opinion may be formed from the limited portion of the system procured, it has 

 been complicated by specializations to an extent unequalled in any form hitherto 

 presented. The Table contains two hundred and sixty-seven distinct questions 

 descriptive of persons in the lineal and first four collateral lines. Many of these 

 questions are twice stated, once with Ego a male, and a second time with Ego a 

 female, and some of them are in the alternative form of elder or younger, where 

 relative age varied the relationship. It was also found that in some cases a double 

 set of terms existed for the relationships of the same persons, one of which was 

 used by the males, and the other by the females. With a schedule of questions 

 elaborated to meet the most of these peculiarities it was found that all of the 

 nations, whose dialects were sufficiently open and accessible to enable their system 

 to be fully reached, answered these questions in full, the discriminations in fre- 

 quent instances running beyond the compass of the schedule. Wherever blanks 

 occur in the Table it was for want of facilities to ascertain the relationships of the 

 persons described, and not from a failure of the system to recognize them. In other 

 words, the Indians of all these nations know their kindred, near and remote, and pre- 

 serve that knowledge by the usage of addressing each other by the term of relationship. 

 Now the Spokane recognition and classification of kindred undoubtedly extend to 

 and include every person described in the Table, and their nomenclature furnishes 

 the terms of relationship applied to each and all of them. More than this, instead 

 of leaving blanks to attest the failure of the system, a large number of the present 

 single questions must be repeated, and some new ones added to develop the whole 

 of the system. The tendency to a double nomenclature, and consequently to a two- 

 fold system of relationship, one for the males and another for the females, is qiiite 

 marked among the nations west of the mountains. The incompleteness of the 

 schedules, therefore, must be attributed to the inaccessibility of these dialects, and 

 not to a failure of the system to recognize any relationship between Ego and the 

 persons described. 



There is one feature in the Spokane system that has not before appeared, namely, 

 the use of the same term in a reciprocal sense, instead of correlative terms ; for 

 example I call my father's father, Is-hah'-pd, and my son's son, Is-hah'-pa, conse- 

 quently the relationship is reciprocal, as cousin and cousin, or brother and brother, 

 instead of correlative, as grandfather and grandson. This was carried into the first 

 collateral line male, in the first Spokane schedule of Mr. Gibbs, but in a subsequent 

 and revised schedule the term was used in a modified form. According to the first 

 I call my father's brother, Is-se-malt, and my brother's son, Is-se-malt, Ego in both 

 cases being a male, which would establish between my brother's son and myself a 

 reciprocal relationship expressed by a single term. In the revised schedule he is 

 my son, Kas-koo-sa. to which the other term is added for some explanatory purpose. 

 It seems probable that the term Is-se-mdlt is employed to indicate the relationship 

 of these persons when speaking of their relationship to a third person ; and that 

 when they speak to each other they use the terms for father and son. The opu- 



