8 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
Such were the rights, privileges, and obligations of the members of an 
Iroquois gens; and such were those of the members of the gentes of the 
Indian tribes generally, as far as the investigation has been carried. 
For a detailed exposition of these characteristics the reader is referred 
to Ancient Society, pp. 72-85. 
All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they 
were bound to defend each other’s freedom; they were equal in privileges 
and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority ; and 
they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, 
equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles 
of the gens. hese facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a 
social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society 
was organized, A structure composed of such units would of necessity 
bear the impress of their character, for as the unit so the compound. It 
serves to explain that sense of independence and personal dignity univer- 
sally an attribute of Indian character. 
Thus substantial and important in the social system was the gens as it 
anciently existed among the American aborigines, and as it still exists in 
full vitality in many Indian tribes. It was the basis of the phratry, of the 
tribe, and of the confederacy of tribes. 
At the epoch of European discovery the American Indian tribes gen- 
erally were organized in gentes, with descent in the female line. In some 
tribes, as among the Dakotas, the gentes had fallen out; in others, as 
among the Ojibwas, the Omahas, and the Mayas of Yucatan, descent had 
been changed from the female to the male line. Throughout aboriginal 
America the gens took its name from some animal or inanimate object and 
never from a person. In this early condition of society the individuality 
of persons was lost in the gens. It is at least presumable that the gentes 
of the Grecian and Latin tribes were so named at some anterior period ; 
but when they first came under historical notice they were named after 
persons. In some of the tribes, as the Moki Village Indians of Arizona, 
the members of the gens claimed their descent from the animal whose 
name they bore—their remote ancestors having been transformed by the 
Great Spirit from the animal into the human form. The Crane gens of 
