hardly ever keeps a secret to himself alone; it is nearly always shared
by others whom the matter directly concerns. It may be said of the red
man that he keeps secrets in the same manner that he lives,--namely, in
groups or clusters. The reason is that with him individualism, or the
mental and moral independence of the individual, has not attained the
high degree of development which prevails among white races.

When Europeans began to colonize America in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the social organization of its inhabitants presented a
picture such as had disappeared long before on the continent of Europe.
Everywhere there prevailed linguistic segregation,--divisions into
autonomous groups called tribes or stocks, and within each of these,
equally autonomous clusters, whose mutual alliance for purposes of
sustenance and defence constituted the basis of tribal society. The
latter clusters were the clans, and they originated during the
beginnings of the human family. Every clan formed a group of supposed
blood-relatives, looking back to a mythical or traditional common
ancestor. Descent from the mother being always plain, the clan claimed
descent in the female line even if every recollection of the female
ancestor were lost, and theoretically all the members of one clan were
so many brothers and sisters. This organization still exists in the
majority of tribes; the members of one clan cannot intermarry, and, if
all the women of a clan die, that clan dies out also, since there is
nobody left to perpetuate it. The tribe is in reality but a league; the
clan is the unit. At the time we speak of, the affairs of each tribe
were administered by an assembly of delegates from all its clans who at
the same time arbitrated inevitable disputes between the several
blood-relations.

Each clan managed its own affairs, of which no one outside of its