358 ACCULTURATION IN SEVEN AMERICAN INDIAN TRIBES

Coola Breaker Society. It is not entirely clear whether this was
a society; but at any rate a number of nobles were said to have
had DzEgwanli. The DzEgwanli was the prerogative of destroy-
ing property of the host at a potlatch, and of distributing prop-
erty, but not as direct payment for the destroyed property. With
the DzEgwanli, as with the nEts? went a song and dance. The
last DzEgwanli dancer was a woman. Guests at a potlatch had
the right to demand small gifts from her, tobacco, some article
of her personal clothing, etc. At the conclusion of her dance she
always distributed tobacco. Host chiefs feared the DzEgwanli
because of the damage done to the house when they were
through. According to one informant, the DzEgwanli was a
police force to maintain a high order of hospitality among chiefs.
At least upon one occasion, the Alkatcho Carrier wrecked the
house and dumped all the food into the fire of a chief of a neigh-
boring Carrier village because he had not supplied enough food
for his guests. When the DzEgwanli dancer was a woman her
colleagues had the right to grasp her vulva in the dance. They
had no other sexual rights over her.

PATTERNS OF SOCIAL DOMINANCE

Social status depended upon factors of kinship, age and rank.
Because of a relatively strong stress upon sex equality the sex
factor was of little significance.

KINSHIP

Even apart from social rank considerations, the first-born of a
line of siblings, male or female, was the “boss,” the person
looked to for advice, the regulator of economic activities, the
chairman in inter-familial discussions—in short, the family cen-
ter. ‘he authority and prestige of the “boss” became even more
defined when associated with social rank, and was at a relative
minimum in a family of poor people. In general, in intra-familial
relations the generation and relative age factors were of sig-
nificance in conditioning dominance behavior. The sibling clas-
sification distinguished linguistically between older and younger