l899-'00 TRANSACTIONS 87 



sisters, that is to members of his own clan, to which his own 

 children did not belong. 



When I visited lyorette, and later on Caughnawaga, I was 

 anxious to find out whether there was left any trace of the old- 

 time female clanship. At Lorette, not only did I ascertain that 

 the clan was no longer a live institution ; but even the memory 

 of it had become ver^^ dim. The members of the band whom I 

 questioned on the subject, were not totally ignorant of the clan, 

 but they invariably connected it with male descent. One man, 

 seventy-six years of age, told me he belonged to the clan 

 or ' 'compagnie' ' of the Deer, because his 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 ?' ' 



One day, I spent a couple of hours chatting with Thomas 

 Tsioui, a typical old Huron (about 80 years of age), living on 

 the 1 600 arpents reserve. Three of his sons still living are hunters 

 as much as conditions permit ; he himself spent the greater part 

 of his early life in the woods, and at one time he was a noted 

 long distance runner at the Quebec and Montreal exhibitions. 

 He was very proud of a picture hung up in the best room of his 

 house, a portrait of George IV. , a royal gift to Michel Tsioui 

 (my host's father) , when as one of the Huron delegation he visited 

 London in 1824. The old man's contention is that the Tsiouis are 

 the only genuine Hurons, all the others being 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 that people. 



At Caughnawaga, on the contrary, I found the tradition of 

 female clanship still quite fresh in the minds of young men as 

 well as old. On one occasion, as I was being rowed across the 

 St. lyawrence by Batiste Canadien and two other Iroquois, I ask- 



