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.