The Genesis of Bilaterality Among Two Divisions of Chippewa1

Abstract

IN THE literature on culture change in North America there is extensive material describing movement from unilineal to bilateral forms of social organization. Siouan, Algonkian and Candoan tribes of the MississippiMissouri valley and Muskogeans and Iroquoians in the southeast have been described by Eggan, Spoehr and others as gravitating to bilateral forms in kinship and social structure. On the Plains where the bilateral band became in almost all tribes the most effective unit of social organization, there have been posited earlier unilineal structures on the basis of analysis of kinship terms and of historical and ecological factors. In the Southwest and Northwest unilineal organization has been weakened during historical times (Eggan 1937; 1950:241-242, 316-317; 1955 503ff; Spoehr 1947; Driver 1961:308, 315, 601). Even in areas long thought to have been characterized by bilateral norms, the Basin and the Arctic, recent research has developed an opposing theory, namely, that in precontact times the units of social organization were unilineal descent groups. Service, on the basis of statements by Jenness, Stefansson and others, as well as his own research in early sources, has presented compelling arguments for the prior existence of patrilocal band groups among the Shoshone and the Eskimo. Service attributes the fragmental family organization of recent times to shrinkage of population and resources in both areas and, in the Basin, the location of horseless groups in refuge areas into which they were driven by congeners fortunate enough to have obtained horses (1962:94-107; 1963:76). Service also questions the aboriginality of composite bands among sub-arctic Algonkians and Athabascans among others, and cites recent ethnohistorical studies to indicate that forms structured on