POWELL. J A STUDY OF TRIBAL SOCIETY. 69 
kindred either in the male or female line; these units being what has 
been well denominated “ gentes.” 
These “gentes” are organized into tribes by ties of relationship and 
affinity, and this organization is of such a character that the man’s 
position in the tribe is fixed by his kinship. There is no place in a tribe 
for any person whose kinship is not fixed, and only those persons can 
be adopted into the tribe who are adopted into some family with arti- 
ficial kinship specified. The fabric of Indian society is a complex tissue 
of kinship. The warp is made of streams of kinship blood, and the woof 
of marriage ties. 
With most tribes military and civil affairs are differentiated. The 
functions of civil government are in general differentiated only to this 
extent, that executive functions are performed by chiefs and sachems, 
but these chiefs and sachems are also members of the council. The 
council is legislature and court. Perhaps it were better to say that the 
council is the court whose decisions are law, and that the legislative 
body properly has not been developed. 
In general, crimes are well defined. Procedure is formal, and forms 
are held as of such importance that error therein is prima facie evidence 
that the subject-matter formulated was false. 
When one gens charges crime against a member of another, it can of 
its own motion proceed only to retaliation. To prevent retaliation, the 
- gens of the offender must take the necessary steps to disprove the crime, 
or to compound or punish it. The charge once made is held as just and 
true until it has been disproved, and in trial the cause of the defendant 
is first stated. The anger of the prosecuting gens must be placated. 
In the tribal governments there are many institutions, customs, and 
traditions which give evidence of a former condition in which society 
was based rot upon kinship, but upon marriage. 
From a survey of the facts it seems highly probably that kinship 
society, as it exists among the tribes of North America, has developed 
from connubial society, which is discovered elsewhere on the globe. In 
fact, there are a few tribes that seem scarcely to have passed that indefi- 
nite boundary between the two social states. Philologic research leads 
to the same conclusion. 
Nowhere in North America have a people been discovered who have 
passed beyond tribal society to national society based on property, 7. e., 
that form of society which is characteristic of Civilization. Some peoples 
may not have reached kinship society ; none have passed it. 
Nations with civilized institutions, art with palaces, monotheism as 
the worship of the Great Spirit, all vanish from the priscan condition 
of North America in the light of anthropologic research. Tribes with 
the social institutions of kinship, art with its highest architectural de- 
velopment exhibited in the structure of communal dwellings, and poly- 
theism in the worship of mythic animals and nature-gods remain. 
