MORICF] FUR TRADER IN ANTHROPOLOGY 73

points, quite often implicitly, to patriarchy as obtaining among
the unadulterated Déné.

Matriarchy, on the other hand, is consequent on a higher state
of society, on more important groupings of less nomadic human
beings: related and unrelated families living together in larger
numbers in villages or towns. With the bands of individuals
allied by the ties of blood under a patriarch, who can hardly be
called a chief,*® breaches of the moral code are scarcely possible.
But it is not so in the case of the crowds of unrelated persons living
in a sedentary condition in the same locality, without sufficient
occupation to diminish the occasions of falls. Then the tempta-
tions to illicit sexual intercourse are too frequent not to make an
impression on people otherwise burdened with no great religious
scruples. Daily familiarities between the sexes often degenerate
into promiscuity, and a time comes when even the real paternity
of children becomes a matter for doubt. :

And let it not be imagined that I purposely darken the picture:
I know whereof I speak, and there is today more than one native
village with a population restrained by no strong religious in-
fluence where conditions are at least as bad.

What more natural, then, in order to establish hereditary
rights on an undisputed basis, than to have descent follow the
maternal, instead of the paternal, line? I do not pretend to have
made a thorough study of this question, but that is the way the
original Déné compared with their heterogeneous neighbors of
the west or the south ever struck me. With all the eastern Déné
the patriarchal system is in vogue, while matriarchy, copied from
the adjoining tribes, obtains among the semi-sedentary branches
of the family which live in close contact with the villagers of
the Pacific coast and coterminous aborigines. On the one hand,
the patriarchy of nomadic bands with hardly any social organiza-
tion, not even real chiefs; on the other, hereditary matrilineal
chiefs and noblemen with distinctive insignia, ceremonial feasting

39 Indeed, before the advent of the whites among them, even the Carriers and
Babines had no real chiefs in our present sense of the word. Cf. Carrier Sociology,
Trans. Royal Soc. of Can., 10: 118; Ottawa, 1893.