Wyandot Government: A Short Study of Tribal Society - Bureau of American Ethnology by John Wesley Powell
page 10 of 25 (40%)
page 10 of 25 (40%)
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Fourth--Rights of order in encampments and migrations.
Fifth--Rights of property. Sixth--Rights of person. Seventh--Rights of community. Eighth--Rights of religion. To maintain rights, rules of conduct are established, not by formal enactment, but by regulated usage. Such custom-made laws may be called regulations. _MARRIAGE REGULATIONS._ Marriage between members of the same gens is forbidden, but consanguineal marriages between persons of different gentes are permitted. For example, a man may not marry his mother's sister's daughter, as she belongs to the same gens with himself; but he can marry his father's sister's daughter, because she belongs to a different gens. Husbands retain all their rights and privileges in their own gentes, though they live with the gentes of their wives. Children, irrespective of sex, belong to the gens of the mother. Men and women must marry within the tribe. A woman taken to wife from without the tribe must first be adopted into some family of a gens other than that to which the man belongs. That a woman may take for a husband a man without the tribe he must also be adopted into the family of some gens other than that of the woman. What has been called by some ethnologists endogamy and exogamy are correlative parts of one regulation, and the Wyandots, like all other tribes of which we have |
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