8 
acting in concert towards all neighbouring peoples. The tribe often 
contained numerous subdivisions — the bands of migratory peoples, 
the villages of the more settled — and each of these subdivisions had 
its own leader or chief ; but there was generally a head chief govern- 
ing and unifying the entire tribe, with authority over all the sub- 
divisions. Wherever these conditions held, the most natural pro- 
cedure in describing the aborigines of a country is to consider one by 
one the individual tribes. In Canada, however, the tribe was seldom 
so definite an organization. Head chiefs were rare, for as a rule bauds 
or villages were ])olitically independent of their neighbours, to whom 
they were bound only by ties of kinship and common interest. The 
remoter bands often diverged considei’ably in dialect, and so readily 
assimilated the customs of alien peoples around them that they lost 
all feeling of political unity with their distant relatives and some- 
times became openly hostile. Furthermore, in the widespread migra- 
tions that occurred shortly before Euroi>eans penetrated into the 
interior, many bands became entirely se}>arated from their kinsmen 
and established themselves in new and remote hunting-grounds. It 
thus becomes impossible in many cases to determine the limits of 
tribal units, or indeed of any political unit larger than the band; and 
the bands w^ere too small, and too numerous, to provide a satisfactory 
basis of classification. 
Even less satisfactory for a detailed description of the aborigines 
is a classification by languages, although it may prove of great value 
in reconstructing their history. Such a classification would compel 
us to join together widely-separated tribes that differed in every 
other way, and to separate neighbouring tribes that differed only in 
speech. Thus the Micmac Indians of Nova Scotia and the Blackfoot 
of the prairies spoke dialects of the same tongue, but were separated 
by two thousand miles, and lived entirely different lives, in ignorance 
of each other’s existence. Conversely, the llairla Indians of the 
Queen Charlotte islands resembled their neighbours, the Tsimshian 
of the Skeena and Nass River basins, in everything except language, 
which was unlike and unrelated. 
A division according to cultural areas holds out more promise 
than either linguistic or tribal divisions, because the cultural areas 
closely corresponded to the physiographic which in large measure 
determined them. The upland portions of Ontario and Quebec — the 
