Page 20 - Fur Trade program Curriculum

A clan was a group of actual and assumed blood relatives, tracing their descent from
a hypothetical, single ancestor through the male line. Every tribal member belonged to
a clan. One could not marry a member of the same clan, thus in any given family a
father and his children belonged to one clan-the mother to another clan. And since
these different clans were distributed among all the bands, they gave each tribe a
certain unity because fellow clansmen recognized one another as close relatives even
when they belonged to different bands.

In addition to the close ties of kinship and family, there were numerous affinal
relatives obtained by intermarriage between families belonging to different clans and
even different tribes. Polygamy was common, at least in the period before 1800.
Therefore a man could have two or more wives, and although in many instances these
wives might have been sisters, in some instances they were not. Thus, in the instances
of plural wives who were not sisters, the husband and his relatives would have acquired
a larger number of affinal relatives than is possible under the European-American
system of marriage.

The religion of the Potawatomis consisted of an organized body of beliefs and ritual
practices involving a concept of a “Great Spirit,” deities of fire, sun, and sea, as well as
gods of the four directions; manitous (a term used by Algonquian Indians to mean the
mysterious and unknown powers of life of the universe), or supernatural power in
natural objects, such as rocks, plants, and animals; and personal manitous, or
guardians, who were acquired by an individual through fasting and dreaming. It was
believed that the human body had but one soul or spirit, which at death followed a trail
over the Milky Way to the west, where there was a heaven.

The power of deities and manitous was visualized by the sacred clan bundles;
Medicine Society bundles, medicine bags, and other sacred objects or charms, as well
as by ritual and ceremonies which involved dancing to the music of drums, rattles, and
whistles and the eating of dogs especially raised for ceremonial feasts. A large body of
mythology also served to make real the power of the deities and manitous.

The dead were buried with ceremony, sometimes after having been placed on a
scaffold for an indefinite period.