long house (from Morgan).]

Each tribe lived in a separate village of long houses, large enough to
hold from five to twenty families. Each family was a clan or
kin--resembling the _gens_ of the Roman, the _genos_ of the Greek--a
{119} group of males and females, whose kinship was reckoned only
through females--the universal custom in archaic times in America. As
among these people the marriage tie was easily sundered and chastity
was the exception,--remarkably so among the Hurons, their kindred--it
is not strange that all rank, titles, and property should be based on
the rights of the woman alone. The child belonged consequently to the
clan, not of the father, but of the mother. Each of these tenement
houses, as they may well be called, was occupied by related families,
the mothers and their children belonging to the same clan, while the
husbands and the fathers of these children belonged to other clans;
consequently, the clan or kin of the mother easily predominated in the
household.[2] Every clan had a name derived from the animal world, as
a rule, and a rude picture {120} of the same was the "totem" or
coat-of-arms of the kin or _gens_, found over the door of a long house
or tattooed on the arms or bodies of its members. The Tortoise, Bear,
and Wolf, were for a long time the most conspicuous totems of the
Iroquois. These people were originally a nation of one stock of eight
clans, and when they separated into five tribes or sections, each
contained parts of the original clans. Consequently, "all the members
of the same clan, whatever tribe they belonged to, were brothers or
sisters to each other in virtue of their descent from the same common
female ancestor, and they recognised each other as such with the
fullest cordiality."

Whatever was taken in the hunt, or raised in cultivation, by any member
of the household--and the Iroquois were good cultivators of maize,
beans, and squash--was used as a common stock for that particular
household. No woman could marry a member of her own clan or kin. The
marriage might be severed at the will of either party. Yet, while the
Iroquois women had so much importance in the household and in the
regulation of inheritance, she was almost as much a drudge as the squaw
of the savage Micmacs of Acadia and the Gulf.

The tribe was simply a community of Indians of a particular family or
stock, speaking one of the dialects of its language. For instance, the
Five Nations or T