Tribe

“ In this wholesale way, and by whiskey and disease, tribe after tribe sink their heads and lose their better, proudest half, before the next and succeeding waves of civilization flow on, to see or learn anything definite of them. ”

“ In these respects, I think this tribe, which I will call the English tribe, is equal to any race of men in the world that has been or is; perhaps superior to any race that has been developed hitherto. ”

“ What strange peoples I should see; tribe after tribe of Indians, then Americans, and at last the French and the Spanish of the Far South! And what adventure there would be! Fights with some of those wild tribes, and with bears, and perhaps with lawless whites. They would try to take from me the hundreds of beaver pelts that I should trap on the way! ”

“ There was indeed no other natural way of accounting for the origin of a tribe: as an existing family would reckon its beginning from the grandfather, so the tribe would come from some remote person, and so at a later time the nation, and then finally the human race. ”

“ It is therefore the distinction of race or tribe, not of religion, that governs the whole interior population throughout this vast region of high mountains and valleys in the centre, with comparatively open country on the north and south; the whole area has been peopled by a conflux of tribes. ”

“ You can easily understand that a tribe (somehow our pilgrims suggest that expression, because they march in a straggling procession through these foreign places with such an Indian-like air of complacency and independence about them) like ours, made up from fifteen or sixteen states of the Union, found enough to stare at in this shifting panorama of fashion today.
Speaking of our pilgrims reminds me that we have one or two people among us who are sometimes an annoyance. However, I do not count the Oracle in that list. ”

“ Tribes that have passed generations exiled from the abodes of their ancestors, when by chance they have been travelling in the vicinity, have been known to turn aside from the highway, and, guided by wonderfully accurate tradition, have crossed the country for miles to some tumulus, buried perhaps in woods, where the bones of their tribe were anciently deposited, and there have passed hours in silent meditation. ”

“ Every tribe, regarded by them as a family, has its ngaitge, or tutelary genius or tribal symbol, in the shape of some bird, beast, fish, reptile, insect, or substance. Between individuals of the same tribe no marriage can take place. ”

“ There were many other clans and tribes of ancient gods with whom these supreme gods had dealings, of which hereafter; and, finally, each of these ancient gods became the progenitor of a new tribe, so that we have a tribe of bears, a tribe of eagles, a tribe of rattlesnakes, a tribe of spiders, and many other tribes, as we have tribes of Utes, tribes of Sioux, tribes of Navajos: and in that philosophy tribes of animals are considered to be coördinate with tribes of men. All of these gods have invisible duplicates—spirits—and they have often visited the earth. ”

“ No tribe so valiant that it has not met with reverses, and the attributing of gigantic strength and supernatural powers to the successful foe, removes among the descendants the sting of their ancestors' defeat. ”

“ The fact that the Tribe was one of the early things for which Man found it necessary to have a name is interesting, because it shows how early the solidarity and psychological actuality of the tribe was recognized; and as to the selection of a name from some animal or concrete object of Nature, that was inevitable, for the simple reason that there was nothing else for the savage to choose from. ”

“ We have noticed a similar feeling with respect to existing tribes and chiefs, in the western world, where the inhabitants never fail to be imbued with those peculiar notions and traditions of the particular tribe about them, which represent the latter as the principal nation, and invest them with tribal traits of superiority. ”

“ One of the wisest things ever said by one of the profoundest philosophers of all time was the warning to the seeker after truth to beware of the influence of the ‘idols (or illusions) of the tribe’ by which he meant that body of traditional prejudices which every sect, family, nation, and neighbourhood has clinging to it, and in the midst of which and at the mercy of which every human being grows up. ”

“ Hence they were the principal source of life of the tribe, as the totem had been of the clan, and were venerated and deified. One common life was held to run through all the members of the tribe and all the domestic animals of the species which was its principal means of support. ”

“ Like all African tribes of any pretence, it includes a great number of smaller or sub-tribes, which are only too glad to be ranked among so important and powerful a tribe, and, for the sake of belonging to it, they forego their own individuality. ”

“ When civilization made its first inroads within the borders of this continent, numerous tribes, each powerful in numbers, were found inhabiting it. Each tribe had its peculiar customs, whether of war, the chase, or religion. ”

“ There is room for a tribe where but five people and their servants are living. Naturally enough, you meet no one. You are in woodland which is after all but little visited though in the midst of crowded England. ”

“ In a different locality some other tribe would be located, and some other totem would be regarded as of the most importance.
In this light effigy-mounds are not mere representatives of animal forms. They are picture-writings on a gigantic scale, and are the source of much true history. They tell us of different tribes, the clans which composed them, the religious beliefs, and the ruling gens of the tribe. Contemplating them, we seem to live again in the far-off past. The white man disappears ”

“ This rise of an independent half-breed tribe is one of the most remarkable results of the great, though undesigned, ethnological experiment which has been in progress ever since the meeting of the diverse races of the Old and New World on the continent of America ”

“ I need not inform you that the aborigines, who inhabit the valley of the Amazon, are all of the so-called Indian race—though there are so many distinct tribes of them that almost every river of any considerable magnitude has a tribe of its own. ”

“ The word tribe is here used to mean a group of that size which in the circumstances considered is selected for survival or destruction as a group. Self-regarding excellences are brought out by the natural selection of individuals; the tribal self is developed by the natural selection of groups. ”

“ The whole tribe hunted and harvested in common, and when they were satisfied they gave themselves up with passion to their dramatic dances. Nowadays we still find tribes, very near to this primitive phase, driven back to the outskirts of the large continents, or in Alpine regions, the least accessible of our globe. ”

“ The kitchen-clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnaean classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe. ”

“ The men of this tribe are generally small of stature, with very coarse and repulsive features. The forehead is low and retreating, the observing faculties large, the intellectual ones scarcely developed ”

“ Their next employment, for it would be too bold an attempt to link so terrible a tribe to the people of their own times, would be to show how this tribe became extinct, and the manner in which the country was first peopled with men like themselves. ”

“ It is that an Indian tribe is a singularly homogeneous body, [F] and, if not disturbed by the intrusion of alien and discordant elements, is susceptible of being governed and controlled with the greatest ease and effect. ”

“ The fate of the tribes I have been endeavouring to describe, is a melancholy one: they are fast disappearing from the face of the earth; and one or two more generations will, in all human probability, see the last of them. ”

“ The prairies, which are interspersed through the tract, yield a fine summer range for cattle, and produce a species of grass, which, when properly cured, is little inferior to timothy. With a country which has thus the elements of prosperity in itself, and an intelligent and industrious population, this tribe must, ere long, present the gratifying spectacle of a civilized race. ”

“ This tribe has a general tradition of a deluge, in which the earth was covered with water, reaching above the highest hills, or mountains, but not above a tree which grew on the latter, by climbing which a man was saved. ”

“ Third, although representing a small population, the numerous tribes had overspread North America and had possessed themselves of all the territory, which, in the case of a great majority of tribes, was owned in common by the tribe. ”

“ A typical example from one tribe when critically studied is found to differ widely from an equally representative example of another tribe, not only in speech, dress, methods of wearing the hair, ornaments, etc., but also in physique and in mental traits. ”

“ The history of the tribe is a swiftly moving picture of social degeneration and gross parasitism extending from its seventeenth century convict ancestry to the present day horde of wandering and criminal descendants. ”

“ Here is a tribe whose wives drive the chariots to battle, here another who paint themselves red and eat honey and monkeys, another who grow their hair long on the right side of their heads and shave it close on the left. ”

“ In a few generations it may be that the whole planet will be covered by one vast American-speaking tribe, composed of innumerable individuals, all thinking 393and acting in exactly the same way, like the characters in a novel by Sinclair Lewis. ”

“ Elsewhere the whole country was inhabited by tribes of a nomadic character, rarely collected in villages except at particular seasons, or for specific objects, though here and there were found more sedentary tribes in villages of bark, encircled by walls of earth, or palisades of wood, whose institutions, commercial spirit, and agriculture, superior to that of the wild rovers, seemed to show the remnant of some more civilized tribe in a state of decadence. ”

“ Who can look forth upon the landscape, and notice the feathered tribes, glancing from tree to tree, and from bush to bush, delighting the eye with their 132 pleasing forms and lovely hues, and the ear with their charming melody, and the heart with that aspect of life and cheerfulness, which they throw over the meadow, forest and field, and not lift up his thoughts to heaven and say, “Oh Lord, how manifold are thy works—​in goodness and mercy hast thou made them all!” ”

“ Here, in the region of trees, church-spires, and house-tops, flutter and have their being the myriad tribes who plunder while they share the abodes of men; the diverse crew who jostle on the earth, the lowest level of creation, with mammals, and walk upon its surface plantigrade ”

“ First, that all tribes of men, from the blackest to the whitest, the most savage to the most cultured, have such general likeness in the structure of their bodies and the working of their minds, as is easiest and best accounted for by their being descended from a common ancestry, however distant. ”

“ With tribes originally belonging to one nation, these would rapidly become formed into dialects according to the manner in which the 153 tribes moved into other hunting grounds, and became settled into distinct tribal groups. ”

“ There are two distinct races of men, viz.:—the wandering and the civilized tribes; (2) to each of these tribes a different form of head is peculiar, the wandering races being remarkable for the development of the bones of the face, as the jaws, cheek-bones, &c., and the civilized for the development of those of the head; (3) to each civilized tribe there is generally a wandering horde attached ”

“ I have seen tribes rise from a state of barbarism to a condition in which they are as civilized in their institutions, in their religion, and in their social refinement and habits, as citizens of the United States, and all this has been done within half a century. ”

“ Then they seem like tribes of the elder world, a connecting link perhaps between the forest and the red men who but a few centuries ago inhabited it, far more real at such a time than the shadowy memories of these vanished inhabitants. ”

“ Every country has, perhaps, had its true wild men, — tribes incapable of civilization: some countries have them yet. Every country, sooner or later, has its civilized races, — sometimes historically known to be immigrant ones, sometimes presumably of an equal antiquity of location to the wild ones near them. ”

“ In the blank interval which the arenaceous deposit represents, tribes and families perished and disappeared, leaving none of their race to succeed them, that other tribes and families might be called into being, and fall into their vacant places in the onward march of creation. ”

“ There are tribes that call themselves by one name, but whose neighbors call them by another; tribes that are known by three or four names, and tribes that have no name except that of their village or chief. ”

“ But while individual tribes are thus distinguished from others, there are numerous cases in which the word for "man" is common to the languages of a considerable number of more or less nearly related tribes, indicating a larger aggregate, for which, in default of a better term, I use the word "nation." ”