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Show 40 INDIAN LINGUI8TIC FAMILIES. ownership. Very different was it with the Indians. Individual ownership of land was, as a rule, a thing entirely foreign to the Indian mind, and quite unknown in the culture stage to which he belonged. All land, of whatever character or however utilized, was held in common by the tribe, or in a few instances by the clan. Apparently an exception to this broad statement is to be made in the case of the Haida of the northwest coast, who have been studied by Dawson. According to him1 the land is divided among the different families and is held as strictly personal property, with hereditary rights or possessions descending from one generation to another. " The lands may be bartered or given away. The larger salmon streams are, however, often the property jointly of a number of families." The tendency in this case is toward personal right in land. TRIBAL LAND. For convenience of discussion, Indian tribal land may be divided into three classes: First, the land occupied by the villages; second, the land actually employed in agriculture; third, the land claimed by the tribe but not occupied, except as a hunting ground. Village sites.- The amount of land taken up as village sites varied considerably in different parts of the country. It varied also in the same tribe at different times. As a rule, the North American Indians lived in communal houses of sufficient size to accommodate several families. In such cases the village consisted of a few large structures closely grouped together, so that it covered very little ground. When territory was occupied by warlike tribes, the construction of rude palisades around the villages and the necessities of defense generally tended to compel the grouping of houses, and the permanent village sites of even the more populous tribes covered only a very small area. In the case of confederated tribes and in the time of peace the tendency was for one or more families to establish more or less permanent settlements away from the main village, where a livelihood was more readily obtainable. Hence, in territory which had enjoyed a considerable interval of peace the settlements were in the nature of small agricultural communities, established at short distances from each other and extending in the aggregate over a considerable extent of country. In the case of populous tribes the villages were probably of the character of the Choctaw towns described by Adair. 9 " The barrier towns, which are next to the Muskohge and Chikkasah countries, are compactly settled for social defense, according to the general method of other savage nations; but the rest, both in the center and toward the Mississippi, are only scattered plantations, as best suits a separate easy 1 Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands, 1878, p. 117. » Hist, of Am. Ind., 1775, p. 282. |
