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CHAPTER IX 
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 
PRIMITIVE MIGRATORY TRIBES 
We have already seen how deeply the physiographic features 
of the country, its climate, fauna, and flora, stamped their impress 
on the lives of the aborigines. The geographical environment, how- 
ever, influenced mainly the outward culture of the tribes or nations. 
Their inner culture, their social customs, political organizations, 
religious ideas and art, were all the products of a long evolution in 
which psychological and historical factors played the major role. 
Tribes shifted their homes during the centuries, came into contact 
with new neighbours from whom they borrowed new customs and 
new ideas, and at rare intervals produced great thinkers and great 
statesmen, like the half-mythical DekanawidaA who directed their 
lives into new channels. Even the outward, material culture derived 
more from these historical causes than from the geographical environ- 
ment. How else, for example, could we account for the great differ- 
ences between the Iroquoians and the Beaver Indians, let us say, 
of the Peace River valley? The former were agricultural peoples 
with semi- fixed homes and well-made cooking vessels of pottery, the 
Beaver nomadic hunters who cooked their meat in vessels of birch 
bark or of woven spruce roots with the aid of hot stones; yet the 
Peace valley is no less fertile than southeastern Ontario, and contains 
as numberless deposits of clay suitable for making pots. If, then, 
the geographical environment fails to explain many of the apparently 
simple features in the economic life of the aborigines, still less can we 
make it our guiding star in discussing their social and religious life, 
which was so much more complex, and varied so greatly from one 
tribe to another. We seem, indeed, to be entering almost a new 
sphere, where causes and explanations lie concealed in a long chain 
of events and phenomena far beyond our vision. 
The ultimate unit of social organization among the Canadian 
aborigines, whatever it may have been with the earliest races of man- 
1 For the history of this Iroquois statesman See Parher, A. C. : 
Kations”; Xew York State Mus. Hull. No. 184 (Albany-, 1916). 
“The Constitution of the Five 
