The indigenous tribal world is not a world of in-group versus out-group. Rather, the tribal world is a web of kinship, structured something like a series of concentric circles – your closest kin, your next closest kin, etc. The entire universe is considered a web of kinship, of mutual reciprocal kinship bonds and obligations. This is the meaning of “all my relations.”
There is a lot of misunderstanding and misrepresentation about the nature of intergroup relations in tribal societies. One thing that I have often heard said is the fact that most indigenous peoples’ names for themselves simply means “human beings” implies that other human groups are not human (which would be a linguistic contradiction, does the word mean “human” or doesn’t it?). Rather, it is that most tribal peoples have no special name for themselves, they are simply the “human beings” who are of this place, among their kin of other species. Other peoples are “the people who…” talk funny, eat or do something different, or live over the hill or upriver. But this doesn’t mean that they aren’t human, any more than the fact that we call our moon “the moon” means that we think that the moons of Jupiter are not moons. People in Oregon talk about going to “the coast” – that doesn’t mean that we don’t think that the Atlantic coast is not a coast. It is “the” coast because this is our world.
The kinship system of tribes works very well internally, but its weakness, in one sense, lies in the sense that “if one of your kin harms one of my kin, all of your kin share the guilt.” Within a tribal community, there will be many social mechanisms and customs, refined through generations, devoted to keeping internal harmony and preventing feuds from developing between clans or families. But between groups with different customs and languages, who do not have shared customs, blood feuds can and did start, and could last for generations. This is not exactly the same as racism in the modern sense, but it has certain things in common with it. (Ironically, in modern society, this one aspect of tribalism is the only aspect that is still alive and well.)
In the old days, the ease with which blood feuds could start between groups of different cultures was part of the incentive to keep your group’s population within bounds, because if your population expanded too much, it could mean stepping on your neighbors’ toes. If hostilities had already developed with your neighbors, that was more incentive to keep from expanding into the buffer zones between you and your neighbors. So this kept human groups dispersed and balanced with their territories, much as packs of wolves or pairs of breeding birds maintain territories, which helps to optimize the balance between population and carrying capacity.
In cultures such as my ancestral culture, it wasn’t exactly thought that war was “bad” and peace was “good”; rather, that a certain amount of war was fine (gives the young men a chance to risk their lives, show their bravery and test their spirit power) but it was to be kept in balance and not allowed to disrupt life.
However, if two groups’ blood feud became so costly that both sides wanted it to end, it could be ended by the two groups deciding to become relatives. Rather than “making peace,” the tribal world “makes relatives.” Once two groups are kin, all warfare and feuding stop, completely and forever. The tribal prime directive is harmony with and caring for your kin.
One of the gifts of the modern world is that modern communications have allowed us to recognize all of the human species as our relatives. If we can bring the tribal sensibility of obligation to our relatives to this recognition that we are all relatives, we may begin to heal the traumas of our species.
