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Show 268 BASIS OP AMERICAN HISTORY [ 1900 States to establish the ownership and succession of Indian lands. To impose a system of male inheritance upon a group accustomed to reckoning descent through the mother is not only incomprehensible but revolutionary, and inevitably meets with the stoutest resistance except from those who may be thereby unexpectedly benefited. The ownership of land in severalty is an idea repugnant as it is novel to many tribes, and, as experience has shown, is requiring generations of cautious management to bring about. Much undeserved censure has been imposed upon the Indian department of the government by enthusiastic but badly informed friends of the aborigines. The difficulties of administration are enormous and are naturally not lessened by ignorance. Probably the most serious error, as it is the most population as if it were a hnmoffifflff ™ * fflTmp To apply the same rules and regulations to the Sioux as to the Zuni is as inadvisable as it is in practice impossible. Even the same stocks exhibit such wide differentiations in culture that linguistic relationship cannot be used to mark the limits of uniform groups for purposes of administration. When a family like the Shoshonean can exhibit such extremes as the degraded bands commonly known as " Digger Indians," and a people capable of such heights of development as the Aztec of Mexico, all principles of classification must give way to that of |