Aboriginal tribe

“ In numbers they did not at any time exceed 20,000 souls, if they ever reached that number. Precarious subsistence and incessant warfare repressed numbers in all the aboriginal tribes, including the Village Indians as well. ”

“ In short, we have tribes with female descent, such as the Dieri and Urabunna, to whom all knowledge of an All Father is denied. We have many large and important tribes with female descent who certainly believe in an All Father. We have tribes of the highest social advancement who are said to show no vestige of the belief, and we have tribes also socially advanced who hold the belief with great vigour. ”

“ There is a tradition—common, I believe, to many black tribes, even outside Australia—that, long before the coming of the white people into this country, two beautiful white girls lived with the blacks. ”

“ If the mother-in-law is near other members of her tribe at such a time, they endeavour to conceal her, but they are not at liberty to say that her son-in-law is approaching, nor may they mention his name. Even at the Aboriginal Stations, where the Aboriginals are, one may say, civilized, and to some extent weaned from their prejudices, and where nearly all their ancient customs are in disuse or forgotten, this one lingers; and a woman will for some reason always avoid the sight of a certain man of the tribe. ”

“ This distinction is not confined to the human beings of the tribe, who must be of one or the other, but there are the Gwaigulleeah and Gwaimudthen divisions in all things. The first and chief division in our tribe, as regards customary marriage law, is the partition of all tribes-folk into these 'phratries,' or 'exogamous moieties.' While in most Australian tribes the meanings of the names of phratries are lost, where the meanings are known they are usually names of animals—Eagle, Hawk, and Crow, White Cockatoo and Black Cockatoo, and so forth. ”

“ Such is the history of the aboriginal tribes of Australia, whose remarkable manners and customs are fast disappearing, together with the natives themselves. The poor creatures are aware of the fact, and seem to have lost all pleasure in the games and dances that formerly enlivened their existence. Many of the tribes are altogether extinct, and others are disappearing so fast that the people have lost all heart and spirit, and succumb almost without complaint to the fate which awaits them. ”

“ But the frequent conflicts that have occurred between the colonists and the Aborigines within the limits of the colony of New South Wales, make it, I think, sufficiently manifest that the Aboriginal tribes are neither a conquered people, nor have tacitly acquiesced in the supremacy of the settlers. The rights of the Aborigines of this district if the testimony which has been adduced as to the civilization and capacity be true, cannot, I should imagine, differ from those of other Aboriginal tribes within the limits of the same government. ”

“ There can be no doubt that this desperate forecasting of the destiny of our aboriginal tribes has, latently or in avowal, swayed the minds of a vast number in each generation here, and has by no means been confined to those violent, merciless fighters and desperadoes who have done their utmost to carry out the presumed decree of fate. ”

“ Efforts have been made to reach the so-called aboriginal tribes, who occupy a large part of the provinces of Yunnan and Kwelchow, and of late these people, the Nosu, and Hwa Miao, have responded to the work done among them in a movement similar to the mass movements among the jungle tribes in India. ”

“ From such sources we derive the most authentic information we possess of that transition period in the condition and fortunes of many of our aboriginal tribes when the intrusion of Europeans upon them with their tempting goods and their rival schemes, which equally tended to dispossess them of their heritage, introduced among them so many novel complications. Some of the narratives of the whites, who, under the conditions just referred to, lived for years and were assimilated with the Indians, present us occasionally by no means unattractive pictures of the ordinary tenor of life among them. ”

“ This can of course only apply to tribes tolerably well known to Europeans, and more or less frequently coming in contact with them. Of tribes in their natural state we can have no accurate data, and but few passing notes even that are worthy of confidence. Generally I have found children to be numerous among tribes who have never had intercourse with Europeans' and it is a well known fact that the increase of numbers in aboriginal tribes is checked in proportion to the frequency, or the extent of their communication with Europeans. ”

“ At the epoch of European discovery the American Indian tribes generally were organized in gentes, with descent in the female line. In some tribes, as among the Dakotas, the gentes had fallen out; in others, as among the Ojibwas, the Omahas, and the Mayas of Yucatan, descent had been changed from the female to the male line. Throughout aboriginal America the gens took its name from some animal or inanimate object and never from a person. In this early condition of society the individuality of persons was lost in the gens. ”

“ Some of these various objects are the more interesting, as furnishing, so to speak, the last proofs of the aboriginal skill which, in proportion to the increasing intercourse of the savage tribes with European civilization, is rapidly diminishing, and in all the principal colonies may be considered as already extinguished. ”

“ Reliable and learned authors who have made the aboriginal race of America an object of deep study and research, have arrived at the conclusion, that the numerous tribes into which they are divided, belong not to the same primitive family or generic stock, but are to be ranged under several well-defined heads or types. ”

“ The opinion assumed, rather than advocated, by a large class of writers on this and kindred subjects is, that the aboriginal inhabitants of any country are the proprietors of every part of its soil of which they have been accustomed to make any use, or to which they have been accustomed to assert any title. This claim is represented as sacred, however ignorant such natives may be of the arts or of the habits of civilised life, however small the number of their tribes, however unsettled their abodes, and however imperfect or occasional the uses they make of the land. ”

“ Although they are a different type of people from, and superior to the mainland aboriginal, being Polynesian in strain, and naturally village dwellers and horticulturists as well as fishermen, the Torres Strait tribes, whose islands have been closely reserved, afford an example of the degree to which natives can be developed to self-dependence. ”

“ It was held by some very intelligent witnesses who were examined by the Aboriginal Committee in 1830, and who had been in the colony from the day of its foundation, that at the time of the first landing of the European settlers the number of savages then in the woods was not less than 7,000, a fact which could not be certainly known, but which might be pretty fairly guessed from the number of known tribes, and a good estimate of their strength. ”

“ Furthermore let it be noted that, according to his explicit statement, the aboriginal village organization had broken down utterly, and the Indians were living in new places in conformity with new economic and social requirements. No wonder modern informants frequently cannot look past the period of upheaval and give us a clear picture of untouched aboriginal life before the white man came! ”

“ In the one case, the petty tribes among which the land was originally divided consented to mix, and dissolve, and be digested as it were together, in order to revive again for a more glorious career; while in the other, the aboriginal societies have adhered stiffly to their distinctive characters, and failing to submit to the regenerating process, cling together in indigested portions, rather than assimilate into one great whole. ”

“ No aboriginal nation or people has ever yet been discovered, to my knowledge, which has not professed to have a mysterious ancestry of a mythical character. It is interesting to mark the analogies and the differences between their various systems. Although among some tribes who have lived much in communication with the whites, their cosmogony has been confounded very much with the Mosaic or Scripture account, so that it is now often difficult to distinguish clearly the aboriginal from the imported, yet all the Americo-Indian tribes have more or less preserved their traditions on this subject. ”

“ For this purpose the United Band of Temperance Aboriginals was formed, blankets were distributed, moralising influences were brought to bear, and I am proud to be able to state my opinion, founded upon, statistics, that in the course of fifty years from the present time, not a single intoxicated aboriginal will be found in the length and breadth of the colony. ”

“ It is difficult to describe an Indian tribe by the affirmative elements of its composition. Nevertheless it is clearly marked, and is the ultimate organization of the great body of the American aborigines. The large number of independent tribes into which they had fallen by the natural process of segmentation is the striking characteristic of their condition. Each tribe was individualized by a name, by a separate dialect, by a supreme government, and by the possession of a territory which it occupied and defended as its own. ”

“ Our relations with the numerous tribes of aboriginal natives of this country, scattered over its extensive surface and so dependent even for their existence upon our power, have been during the present year highly interesting. ”

“ Such are the six principal tribes who form the nucleus, or, to use a military phrase, the right wing of the expatriated aboriginal population, as the bands are arranged in their order from south to north, in the trans-Ozark or Indian territory. ”

“ We have learned that the remnant of an aboriginal people, now living in the inhabited pueblos of the West, present us, in their primitive usage, with the fading outlines of a culture once widespread in the section of country we have examined. Many of the early sedentary tribes have vanished completely. Traditions state that other tribes have moved southward into regions unknown. ”

“ The letter began: "I beg to acquaint your Excellency that a successful intercourse has been effected among those sanguinary tribes of Natives who have for so great a period infested the settled districts, and known as the Oyster Bay, Little Swanport. Ben Lomond, Cape Portland, and Piper's River Aborigines." Mr. Robinson further ventures to assert that" the whole aboriginal population could be brought together by the same means that has hitherto been adopted." ”

“ While our experience shows that the art could have been extended farther to the extremes of the continent, it is doubtful if the aboriginal type could have been greatly extended without fundamental changes. In other words, the more primitive hunting tribes of the north and south borrowed the trait one after the other, so far as their habitat permitted. ”

“ Certainly the aboriginal population is steadily diminishing, and all tribes are being driven constantly farther up into the mountains; or, in the case of certain tribes—such as the Ami and Paiwan—are being more rigidly confined to the precipitous, barren east coast. The whole of the island—including the marvellously fertile great plains on the west side of the central mountain range—was naturally once in the hands of the aborigines. ”

“ There is a half-caste man and a half-caste woman married, and they have one child. There are three half-caste women on the station who have had children to white men, but they were not married. The children of the latter have the complexion of Europeans, and have but little of the Aboriginal caste in the face. Only those who are well acquainted with the peculiar features of the Aborigines would suspect that these children had Aboriginal blood in their veins. ”

“ The duties performed and the ceremonies used in receiving and attending to the wants of a strange tribe have meanings quite intelligible to the Aborigines. When they welcome the strangers to the forest lands they signify that as long as they are friendly, and under such restrictions as their laws impose, they and their children may come there again without fear of molestation; the presents of boughs and leaves and grass are meant to show that these are theirs when they like to use them ”

“ The aboriginal inhabitants are still numerous in the mountain districts, and along some parts of the eastern shores, but they, are said to be much oppressed by the Chinese colonists, and also by the authorities. ”

“ Another striking trait of the race is found in their legends and tales. Those of the aboriginal race who excel in private conversation, become to their tribes oral chroniclers, and are relied on for historical traditions as well as tales. It is necessary, in listening to them, to distinguish between the gossip and the historian, the narrator of real events, and of nursery tales. For they gather together everything from the fabulous feats of Manebozho and Misshozha, to the hair-breadth escapes of a Pontiac, or a Black Hawk. ”

“ We have only to cast our eyes in the direction of any wave of settlement to behold the disastrous effects our occupation of the land has had on the natives. Take, for instance, the Lake Eyre region, which embraces the Dieri, Yantowannta, Ngameni, and Yauroworka tribes. ”

“ They are by no means to be compared to the nomadic tribes of red-skins, everywhere infesting the prairie, plain, and mountain of the far West, for murder and plunder. Like other Pueblo tribes, these people show marked and distinctive peculiarities, not that they differ essentially in type from the other branches of the great aboriginal families, but as regards their originality in costume, and their strong conservatism. ”