Band (Indian tribe)

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The English expression band (" gang , group , horde "; French bande , from Occitan banda " following the same banner ") was originally a foreign name for tribes and subgroups of the North American Indians and was subsequently adopted by some tribes as an official proper name , for example with the First Nations in Canada . In individual cases, band can be the name for a tribal group, a tribe or an Indian nation. In technical terms, band is the English equivalent of the horde in ethnology (ethnology) and anthropology .

The early British and French colonizers of North America used the term band (e) generally for smaller Indian groups, regardless of how these groups referred to themselves or in what organizational context they were. Such a bond could in reality only be a local community of a few families, or a subgroup of a tribe, or a small tribe, or a small people of its own . The Europeans did not see the social and political organization of the Indians, for example in lineages , clans , tribes or nations - and for the most part there was no interest in them due to Eurocentric thinking. In a similar way, the designation chief ( chieftain ) was partially undifferentiated transferred to real or supposed leaders of ethnic groups in order to externally determine a responsible contact person.

Many of the Indian groups affected, partly voluntarily, partly by force, took on the attribution as a band , some officially included it in their group names, for example with the Cheyenne , Shoshone , Potawatomi and Paiute in the Great Basin and with the Apaches in the southwest of today's USA . In the Osage in Indian territory there was next to Moiety lineage and clans, the band as another form of political organization. With the Canadian First Nations is tied since the Indian Act - approved Act of 1876 as a legally valid self designation of Indian tribes, together with its own political administration, the tape council , headed by a chief (for example with the Gitxsan and Nisga'a in the Pacific Northwest ). The name is also officially in use in the USA.

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