The Clan System

How a Clan System works

As mentioned before, indigenous kinship systems fall into two broad categories: clan systems and what I can “spiderweb” systems, in which there are many varying degrees of closeness and distance in relationships. The Clan system is a more stable system that works better for larger groups of people. It also could provide a more stable kind of system for Rewilders who are attempting to retribalize than the more fluid “spiderweb” system. Modern society has a great deal of instability in its families (the state and modern economics are both adversaries of kinship, and destroys families, extended families and communities. Rewilders who are attempting to retribalize, in my opinion, should take a look at the social stability that the Clan system offers.

My own people are a “spiderweb” type. What I am going to describe about the Clan system is based on the matrilineal Clan system of the Hodenosaunee, which I learned about while living for a year with the Akwesasne Mohawks, and similar Clan systems of the East that I have studied, especially the Aniyunwiya (Cherokee).

The original five nations of the Hodenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, had been in escalating revenge wars with one another. The Peacemaker (whose name I will not write because it is spoken only in a ceremonial context) was able to bring instant and permanent peace to the Five Nations by one single principle: all members of one clan (say, Wolf Clan Mohawk) were kin to members of the same clan in the other nations (say, Wolf Clan Onondaga or Seneca). This immediately brought peace because everyone in each nation had siblings in the other nations. Not only would it be unthinkable to make war against your own clan brothers and sisters (so a Wolf Clan Mohawk could never make war against his Wolf Clan Oneida brothers and sisters) but if Mohawks of other clans were to endanger your Wolf Clan brothers and sisters, you would be obliged to stop them. The tribal/national affliation and the clan affiliation were like the warp and woof threads of a very strong and stable fabric. This is the power of kinship and the genius of the clan system. Then the Iroquois Constitution (which literally translates as “The Great Good”) is built upon the clan system.

Today on the reservations the people have been forced to reorganize themselves into nuclear families, but people keep clanship alive and remember how they once lived in a clan based community.

Clans can be as few as two (called moieties by anthropologists) or as many as dozens. The Mohawks have three clans, Turtle, Bear, and Wolf, so I will use that as an example.

Say you are a Wolf Clan Mohawk. This means that all other members of the Wolf Clan are your siblings, your literal brothers and sisters. Or your literal mothers and uncles if they are of that generation, or your literal sons and daughters or nieces and nephews, depending on whether you are a woman or a man.

As a Wolf Clan member, you can travel anywhere within the Iroquois Confederacy and, upon arriving in a village, look for the longhouse with the Wolf Clan symbol and be welcomed as a long-lost family member.

Since every member of the Wolf Clan is your immediate relative, it would be incest for you to marry anyone in the Wolf Clan. This is a key to the Clan system. It would be very easy for clans to split up into rival feuding groups were it not for the fact that the clans are all intermarried and every man has a spouse and children who belong to a different clan. So intermarriage weaves the clans together in a single community.

In each village, each clan has its own communal longhouse where the clan lives together. (More than one if necessary.) But if you are a man, you must find a spouse from a different clan. Say you find a wife from the Bear Clan. This means that you leave the Wolf Clan longhouse and go live, at least part of the time, in the Bear Clan longhouse.

The permanent membership of the clan longhouse is the women, since the men leave their own clan longhouse to go live with their wife’s clan. The core of the clan is the women’s community: your sisters, mothers, and daughters are the permanent members of the Wolf Clan longhouse. The internal leaders of the Clan are Elder women called Clan Mothers, who are also in charge of choosing and overseeing the male chiefs who represent the clan’s external leadership. The Clan Mothers all know the males of their clan since birth and have a good idea of who has leadership capabilities.

But even if you are living in the Bear Clan house with your wife and children, you are not really involved in raising the children whom you father. They aren’t actually considered “your” children; they are the children of the Bear Clan, your wife’s clan. The children of you and your wife inherit her clan membership, which is Bear Clan, and Bear Clan children are raised by Bear Clan women and men – in other words, your wife and her brothers, who are Bear Clan men. You, on the other hand, might be called back to the Wolf Clan house to help raise the children of your own clan, especially your sister’s children. (Even though all the Wolf Clan members are your siblings, your actual sisters are your closest siblings.)

So you likely end up dividing your time between the Wolf Clan longhouse and the Bear Clan longhouse of your wife and children, and the Men’s House, where men of your clan could hang out together and be buds.

As can be guessed, in this system divorce is very easy, and has no real consequences in terms of disturbing the stability of the family or the raising of children. It is also possible (though not common) for a man to have more than one wife as long as both wives are of the same clan and live in the same clan longhouse. The matrilineal Clan system easily accommodates both polygamy (if there is a shortage of men) and serial monogamy, and marital fidelity is stressed because of practical problems of jealousy and human relations. But marital fidelity (for women) is not the critical issue that it is in civilized society in which paternity must be positively sure because children inherit property and social status. Since clan membership goes through the mother, there is simply no reason to be concerned about the paternity of a child, and therefore there is no reason to treat women as property or try to control their sexuality, or worry about silly things like virginity.

The quality of the relationship between a husband and wife is a private matter for them to work out together – it is not the tribe’s concern, because nothing really depends on whether marriages stay together or not (in contrast to modern society, where the family falls apart if the marriage falls apart).

This model has shown itself to be very stable and successful (until outside forces started acting up it). But it depends above all on a strong women’ community – solidarity and cooperation among the women, and strong women elders.

Thanks Sacha for sharing.
That was concise and clear. I learned some good things.
Especially now that we are two families, and possibly a third one in the process of uniting and forming a tribe. There are alot of aspects to consider.

That’s so cool.

I was recently thinking about symbols as a method to identify friendly groups.

Maybe something like a small totem or pendant that was only known to friendly groups, because post-crash there will be a lot of hostile groups around.

Very interesting system.
I’m going to have to research this in regards to the Celtic tribes.

Gonna talk about them spiders soon? Ai’m rather curious about that, since ai’ve never heard an explanation of it before. The clan system sounds really cool though! Thanks for explaining about divorce not affecting anything big!

Okay, I think I will go ahead and use this thread to describe the other broad form of tribal kinship as well. This form I have called the Spiderweb system.

(BTW, I made some other posts about tribal kinship systems in the “Feminism” thread in Relationships section, and “Endemic Warfare” thread in the Misconceptions section. Misko, the discussion in the Feminism thread might be particularly relevant to you and your family-merger.)

Okay, back to the discussion of tribal kinship systems…

In general, tribes that are sedentary and made up of interconnected villages use the Clan system (including almost all tribes of the Northeast and Southeast regions of the present-day US, and the Pueblos). The Clans bind together all the villages, because the same clans would be found in every village, and that means that you have family in every village, and no village becomes insular and “ingrown” away from the other villages. The essential defining characteristic of a Clan is, since all members of your Clan are your immediate family, you have to marry someone from another Clan, which keeps Clans from becoming insular and “ingrown” away from other Clans. This This system of interwoven kinship ties creates a very stable society and so it is widely used among sedentary horticultural tribes with relatively large territories, such as the Cherokee.

On the other hand, the Spiderweb system is more common among nomadic peoples who live in small mobile bands. (There are exceptions to this pattern – the Navajos and Apaches, who used to be nomadic, have a Clan system. I don’t know how how their Clan system works, though, but I know the Navajos have upwards of 60 Clans.)

In the Spiderweb system, picture yourself as a spider in the center of a web. You are at the center of ever-widening concentric circles. The closest circle is your closest relatives, the next closest circle are your next closest relatives, and so on. The circles get bigger and bigger, and farther and farther, extending outward to encompass all your relations. Your relatives include all beings, human and nonhuman, who belong to the Place of which you are part.

Rather than either being a member, or not, of a group with a clearly defined membership (Turtle Clan or Deer Clan), everyone is at the center of a “spiderweb” in which relationships are of varying degrees of closeness or distance. There is a certain point at which the relationship is distant enough to permit marriage.

In some Spiderweb cultures, there may be complex terminology for your relationships to everyone in all those circles (often the same term may be used for a mutual relationship – for example, you and the son of your mother’s sister may have the same relationship term for each other. It is as though “my Grandfather” and “my Grandson” were the same word, because it is not the actual people being described, as much as the strand on the relationship-web that connects them in a particular relationship.

In other Spiderweb cultures, it may simply be that all women of a particular age are address as your Mother or Auntie, or your Grandmother, or Sister, your Daughter or Granddaughter, all men of a particular age are your Brother, or your Father or Uncle, or your Grandfather, or your Nephew, etc. Nevertheless, there is an awareness of what “Sisters” and “Brothers” are far enough apart to be marriage partners.

In some Spiderweb cultures, especially those in which bands are very small (between a dozen and two dozen people) kin relationships may be even more vague and informally defined – the kinship consists more of a strong feeling of kinship than formal definitions of what that kinship consists of. There is a more or less intuitive sense, rather than formal definitions, of who is too close to marry. In regions with sparse resources, very small and mobile bands with fluid membership are most adapted, so you find this kind of structure among peoples such as the Kalahari Bushmen, the Paiute, and the Inuit.

This is probably the closest to how rewilding bands will begin to organize themselves. This is a social structure that allows for maximum flexibility. Because of its intimacy, the small-band society is not dependent on “rules” but is able to deal with each situation that comes up pragmatically – what will best promote the well-being of our group. (However, for people not raised to communicate in this way, it will be important to learn this skill. And I think that internet forums that are run the right way actually provide some good practice in group communication.)

Small-band societies such as the Kalahari Bushmen can have very fluid membership. You can easily leave one band and join another, which means that bands camped in areas with lots of food may grow and those camped where there is less food may shrink (which means that people distribute themselves as the land tells them to) and people can easily leave a band they are not getting along with and move to a different band (which helps each band get the members who get along best).

But important to remember is that all the bands are members of the same tribe. They share the same language and customs, and a common identity that comes out of the same spirit of Place, the same Story. All the bands regard themselves as kin to one another and their members all regard one another as kin; that is what defines them as belonging to the same tribe.

The tribe has a territory. Within the broad expanse of that territory, all the bands have the freedom to move around. It is the common territory of all members of the tribe. Moreover, everyone in all the bands shares the common aim of helping the land to be as rich as possible in wild food resources, so that wherever you go, in your territory, you encounter abundance, and when you leave, you leave greater abundance behind. (Everyone should read Tending the Wild to get an idea of how this was done.)

There really is not the sharp dividing line between hunting/gathering and horticulture that anthropologists have promoted – there is a kind of “invisible gardening” that works with nature rather than against it, which means it takes very little labor. You can loosen the camas roots and do other things to encourage their growth, then your band leaves on its yearly circuit, and when you come back to the camas grounds in a year, the camas is more abundant than ever.

Imagine being part of a band of the rewilded Tualatin River tribe, say. Everywhere you camp, you work to regenerate the ecosystem and encourage its life-supporting capacity, and everywhere you camp, you find wild food and medicine in abundance. Apples feed deer, raccoons and humans everywhere you go. Everyone who shares the spirit of the Place becomes part of the same tribe.

I’ve been working to imagine that as best I can. Well, in a different place, but…

I have a lot of doubts about whether or not I’ll see that in my lifetime, but I also have a lot of hope for my daughter and my nephews.

Well I’m no expert, but I have done some research into the Highland clan system in regards to understanding my name place.
The English word clan comes from the Gaelic clann meaning “children of the family”.

The Scottish Highland clan system incorporated the Celtic/Norse traditions of heritage as well as Norman Feudal society so was more hierarchical than the clan system Sacha talks of. All clans had a patriarchal clan chief who all the clan members paid rent to and looked at him as their common ancestor and he in turn would settle disputes within the clan and organise matters with other clans such as warfare, games, marriages and funerals.

I don’t know about incest taboos as I can’t find any information on this area, but in translating my name McKay back into Gaelic you get Mac Aoidh which means “son of fire”. If your female and have a Celtic surname that begins with Mac you are saying your name wrong as Mac means “son of” and you want to be saying Nic meaning “daughter of” so for example Nic Aoidh means “daughter of fire”.

I know that it was common for the highland clans to practice fosterage as a way of bonding inside the clan and sometimes within other clans too. So a newly birthed child was fostered into another household within the same clan to help foster the kinship of being son/daughter of the clan itself rather than of your genetic parents. So they must have had incest taboos similar to what Sacha describes in her clan system.

As a current Mackay clan member I’m suppose to see Hugh Mackay the 14th Lord Reay and conservative MP as my chief, but fuck that! As a rewilding animist I would rather see my ancestral clan spirit as fire its self. I feel that the main problem with the Highland clan system was in having your common ancestor as the chief who could then threaten to ostracize you from the clan for not paying rent to him. Where as having your common ancestor as an outsider from the human community be it fire, raven or loch then it won’t give the chief the same power and so we can then spend our time giving rent to the landbase that protects and serves the clan far better than any human chief ever could.

Thanks Sacha this is a brilliant thread to start, really words can’t describe how useful I’m finding this. ;D