ibe is fixed by his kinship. There is no place in a
tribe for any person whose kinship is not fixed, and only those
persons can be adopted into the tribe who are adopted into some family
with artificial kinship specified. The fabric of Indian society is a
complex tissue of kinship. The warp is made of streams of kinship
blood, and the woof of marriage ties.

With most tribes military and civil affairs are differentiated. The
functions of civil government are in general differentiated only to
this extent, that executive functions are performed by chiefs and
sachems, but these chiefs and sachems are also members of the council.
The council is legislature and court. Perhaps it were better to say
that the council is the court whose decisions are law, and that the
legislative body properly has not been developed.

In general, crimes are well defined. Procedure is formal, and forms
are held as of such importance that error therein is _prima facie_
evidence that the subject-matter formulated was false.

When one gens charges crime against a member of another, it can of its
own motion proceed only to retaliation. To prevent retaliation, the
gens of the offender must take the necessary steps to disprove the
crime, or to compound or punish it. The charge once made is held as
just and true until it has been disproved, and in trial the cause of
the defendant is first stated. The anger of the prosecuting gens must
be placated.

In the tribal governments there are many institutions, customs, and
traditions which give evidence of a former condition in which society
was based not upon kinship, but upon marriage.

From a survey of the facts it seems highly probably that kinship
society, as it exists among the tribes of North America, has developed
from connubial society, which is discovered elsewhere on the globe. In
fact, there are a few tribes that seem scarcely to have passed that
indefinite boundary between the two social states. Philologic research
leads to the same conclusion.

Nowhere in North America have a people been discovered who have passed
beyond tribal society to national society based on property, i.e.,
that form of society which is characteristic of civilization. Some
peoples may not have reached kinship society; none have passed it.

Nations with civilized institutions, art with palaces, monotheism as
the worship of the Great Spirit, all vanish from the priscan condition
of North America in the light of anthrop