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members, men and women alike, had to marry outside it. Some 
writers believe that in earlier days each clan had its own village, and 
that the clans of one tribe were quite distinct from those of another, 
even when they bore the same names; a man of the Turtle clan in 
the Onondaga tribe, for example, could then marry a Turtle woman 
of the Mohawk tribe. In historic times, however, each clan was 
distributed through several villages, and clans bearing the same name, 
whatever the tribe, formed a single unit. There was also a grouping 
of all the clans of a tribe into two divisions known as phratries, which 
functioned mainly on ceremonial occasions.^ Thus at feasts members 
of the two phratries occupied opposite ends of the ceremonial “Long 
House”; and when an Indian died the people of the phratry opposite 
to his own conducted the funeral. Politically, however, the division 
into phratries possessed little significance, the most important unit 
being the clan. 
The clans themselves were subdivided. The Iroquoians had 
adopted a matrilinear organization that recognized descent through 
the female line alone. A boy belonged not to his father’s clan, but 
to his mother’s; it was from her that he inherited his name and family 
traditions. Every man had divided interests; for if parental affection 
attached him to his own children, who were members of his wife’s 
clan, the clan to which he himself belonged attached him to his 
sisters’ children who alone could be his heirs. The women were, 
therefore, the real guardians of all the names and traditions of a 
clan. Moreover, it was the women who controlled the long, bark 
cabins that sheltered up to twenty individual families. Every cabin 
recognized some elderly female as its ruler, or two females if it con- 
tained families derived from two lines of descent. Thus the clans 
were divided into what have been called maternal families, each ol 
which comprised a “ head woman or matron, her immediate male 
and female descendants, the male and female descendants of her 
female descendants, and so on.”^ An average maternal family num- 
bered from fifty to two hundred persons, grouped in turn into 
individual families of husbands, wives, and children, similar to those 
of our own society. 
1 Wlietlipr there were phratries in the tribes of the Huron confederacy is doubtful. 
2 Goldenweiser, A. A.: “Early Civilization.” p. Ti, New York, 1922. My account of the Lcapjo 
of the Iroquois is largely based on Chapter III in this book and on the paper by the same author 
in the Sum. Kept. 1912, Geol. Surv., Canada, pp. 464-475. 
