The earlier governmental functions were administered through a council of chiefs elected by the gentes. The thoroughly democratic character of the gens may be observed in the fact that any member, female or male, who desired to communicate with the council on matters of public interest, might express her or his opinion either in person or through an orator of her or his own selection.[106] Hence, we observe that government originated in the gens, which was a pure democracy.
Regarding the council of the gens, Mr. Morgan remarks:
It was a democratic assembly because every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it. It elected and deposed its sachem and chiefs, it elected Keepers of the Faith, it condoned or avenged the murder of a gentilis, and it adopted persons into the gens. It was the germ of the higher council of the tribe, and of that still higher of the confederacy, each of which was composed exclusively of chiefs as representatives of the gentes....
All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other’s freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are material because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organized.... At the epoch of European discovery the American Indian tribes generally were organized in gentes with descent in the female line. The gens was the basis of the phratry, of the tribe, and of the confederacy of tribes.[107]
From the foregoing it would seem that the gens—the earliest organization of society of which we have any accurate knowledge—was founded on the “mother-right” or on the supremacy of women. We are assured that the gentile organization is not confined to the Latin, Grecian, and Sanskrit-speaking tribes, but that it has been found “in other branches of the Aryan family of nations, in the Semitic, Uralian, and Turanian families, among the tribes of Africa and Australia, and of the American aborigines.”[108]