OJf TflE ETHNOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA. 661 



villages, and for purposes of government were divided into five or six 

 tribes or sub-nations, still they held fast together by the strong bond of 

 the clan founded on family relationship. 



A peculiar feature of the Huron-Iroquois clanship was that it existed 

 and was transmitted, not through the men, but through the women of the 

 tribe or family. The Huron child did not belong to the clan of his 

 father, but to that of his mother. In the same way the possessions of a 

 deceased Huron warrior did not go to his sons, but to his brothers, or to 

 the sons of his sisters ; that is, to members of his own clan. 



At Lorette to-day no trace is to be found of the old Huron clanship 

 in the social institutions ; even the memory of it is almost effaced. The 

 members of the band whom I questioned on the subject were not totally 

 ignorant of the clan system, but they invariably connected it with male 

 descent. One Huron, ninety years of age, and another seventy-six years 

 of age, told me they belonged to the clan or ' compagnie ' of the Deer, 

 their reason for saying so being that their father had belonged to it. 

 Another claimed to be of the ' compagnie ' of the Tortoise, also because 

 his father had been of that clan ; and to remove my doubts he added : 

 ' How could I belong to a Huron clan through my mother, who was a 

 French Canadian ? ' 



Old Thomas Tsioui (whose name has been mentioned previously) 

 expressed somewhat similar views to me. His contention is that the 

 Tsiuuis are the only genuine Hurons at Lorette ; that all the others are 

 descendants of French Canadians who stole their way into the Huron 

 community. As I objected that the Tsiouis themselves could not claim 

 pure Huron extraction, their mothers and grandmothers in most cases 

 being French Canadian women, the old man argued with great warmth 

 that man, and not woman, the husband, not the wife, made the race. 

 He was seemingly unaware that this was the very opposite of the Huron 

 doctrine, and that his use of such an argument was good proof to me that 

 he was no longer a Huron in respect to some of the fundamental traditions 

 of the race. 



A simple phenomenon which marks the evolution of our Hurons from 

 the patriarchal community and clanship of their ancestors to the reduced 

 family group of to-day is the adoption of distinct family names, trans- 

 mitted from father to son. With the old Hurons there did not really 

 exist any permanent family names other than the general designation of 

 each clan. Each individual was given a name distinctive of himself and 

 of his clan as well, but which, as in the case of the first name with us, he 

 did not transmit to his progeny. ' Each clan,' writes Mr. Connelly, ' had 

 its list of proper names, and this list was its exclusive property, which no 

 other clan could appropriate or use. . . . The customs and usages govern- 

 ing the formation of clan proper names demanded that they should be 

 derived from some part, habit, action, or some peculiarity of the animal 

 from which the clan was descended. . . . Thus a proper name was always a 

 distinctive badge of the clan bestowing it. When death left unused any 

 of the original clan proper names, the next child born into the clan, if of 

 the sex to which the temporarily obsolete name belonged, had this name 

 bestowed upon it.' ^ 



After the missionaries had converted the Hurons to the faith they 

 introduced Christian names, which for many generations were used 



' Connelly, Ontario Archxologioal Re2)ort, 1809, p. 107. 

 1900. 



