cree kinship semantics as interaction

Cree Kinship Semantics as Interaction

REGNA DARNELL University of Western Ontario

Although I am supposed to be a linguist, I have been interested in

Plains Cree kinship for a long time, albeit focusing on its social and

interactional properties rather than on the internal structure of this

presumably universal and biologically based semantic domain. N o

would-be ethnographer can evade systematic attention to kinship, if only

because it provides the metaphorical structure underlying virtually all

social relationship for the Plains Cree of northern Alberta and Saskatche

wan. Social structure and social order are virtually coterminous.

W h e n I first began m y fieldwork in 1969, I recorded kinship terms

and individual genealogies. Armed with m y list from Mandelbaum

(1940, the source from which the terms in the appendix are adapted), I

quickly realized that "us people, w e don't say that any more." Or, "those

people [the ones classified by separate kinship terms without English

equivalents] aren't different from each other." That is, the traditional role

obligations attached to many of the terms, especially those which specify

cross and parallel relations, are no longer discrete. The contrastive terms,

therefore, are redundant.

Furthermore, there is considerable variation within Alberta Plains

Cree in the terms used and in their pronunciation. The forms reported

here are characteristic of the area from Wabasca-Demerey to Saddle Lake.

Moreover, even within a single community, there is some variation in

terminology:

(1) Part of this variation is explicable by generation; older people

remember and continue to use more of the traditional terms because they

grew up when these terms reflected functional differences in social

relations. Terms for peers and elders are used in memory, e.g., nikdwipan

'my deceased mother'.

(2) Knowledge of certain terms depends on whether individuals have

relatives in their o w n families w h o fall into particular categories. This

implies that members of the culture understand and leam the terms in

relationship to particular individuals. They are reluctant, if not unable,

38 REGNA DARNELL

to model the system in abstract terms, presumably because kin terms are

inalienably possessed. One w o m a n told me: "my sister's husband calls

that young w o m a n nistim ['daughter of m y sister']; but me, I never had

to use that name for anyone." She was attempting to avoid a kind of

speaking for others that would not be polite; she could speak comfort

ably only of her own relatives. (3) Some individuals have relatives who come from other areas, or

have themselves lived in other areas. If they have a legitimate reason

(almost always based in kinship) for being identified as a member of the

community where they now live, they are accepted with whatever

idiosyncracies of dialect and local culture they come with.

(4) Sometimes consultants will simply prefer one alternative rather

than another, but propose no reasons, even when pressed. The notion that

a kinship system must be determinate, unambiguous and shared by all

members of the culture simply does not exist.

In sum, then, the reportable terms of relationship are subject to

constant negotiation, albeit this is debate which is expected to produce no

single resolution, even in the particular case. Discussion of what to call

w h o m under what circumstances takes place independently of the

presence of a curious anthropologist. To report on "the kinship terms of

the Plains Cree of northern Alberta and Saskatchewan", therefore,

requires a composite or generic model, more or less acceptable to most

individuals from a range of age groups, sexes and community affiliations.

Such a report will not predict the term by which any given individual in

fact will address any other individual on a particular occasion. It will,

however, provide a guideline for how to interpret the terms of address

and reference which occur in discourse.

I learned anthropology in the heyday of componential analysis; it

was a period in which kin terms were likened to the white rats of the

experimental psychologist — neat, tidy and amenable to elegant analysis.

In those halcyon days, many analysts declined to claim any "psychologi

cal reality" (Sapir 1933) for their models. Robbins Burling summed it up

in the aphoristic choice between "God's Truth" and "Hocus Pocus".

Theoretically inclined anthropologists leaned toward elegant, precise,

replicable models, while the more ethnographically inclined told

anecdotes about the exceptions and insisted that they proved the rules.

CREE KINSHIP SEMANTICS AS INTERACTION 39

Given the kinds of considerations discussed in this paper, I suspect

that such variability and indeterminacy characterize many kinship systems

reported in our professional journals much more statically. The dialogics

of kinship attribution and its social consequences are filtered out, in line

with our professional socialization, somewhere between field notes and

the standard monograph. Sapir's musings about J. O w e n Dorsey's report

that "Two Crows Denies This" does not invalidate a description of

Omaha kinship; two members of the same society may indeed legiti

mately see the structural basis of social order differently.

One week in a Cree community was sufficient to persuade m e that

assumptions about the cognitive integrity of "the kinship system" learned

in m y theory classes in graduate school lacked reality, psychological or

otherwise. Kin terms seemed to be used as often for non-relatives as for

relatives. M a n y genealogical relativeswere called by terms indicating

closer biological relationship than in fact existed. Kinship as a social

fact, manipulable according to situational context and personal intimacy,

was far more significant than mere biology. The bonds of intimacy

which motivated attribution of closer relationship might be those of

personal emotion or simply of the importance a particular relative had

had in someone's life, e.g., substituting for a deceased parent.

Formally-oriented anthropological models tend to dismiss this sort of

variability as "extension" of kinship terms, on the implicit assumption

that the non-biologically-related "relatives" are not fully relatives. Cree

speakers, however, were adamant and virtually unanimous that all

members of any class of relatives were equal in the nature of their

relationship. Membership in any such class of relatives, however, was

dependent upon quite variable and idiosyncratic decisions of individual

Cree persons. N o one else has the right to interfere in or judge such

decisions (though they are intelligible to community members who

decline to comment on whether a usage is unusual; "that is the way they

call each other.") Once assignment to a kin category is made by

someone w ho has the right to do so, however, full membership in the

category is entailed. Moreover, the psychological reality of these judgments is adduced by

the fact that the so-called extensions are dyadic. That is, one must

acquire the relatives of an acquired relative one at a time and by mutual

40 REGNA DARNELL

agreement. One does not necessarily acquire additional relatives in

genealogically consistent ways. The way in which people considered

themselves to be related to other people within a small face-to-face

community could not be understood from the egocentric and highly

symmetrical genealogical kinship diagrams so beloved of anthropologists.

Like most anthropologists, m y fascination grew as I began to acquire

Cree kiinfolk of m y own. Some examples from m y own experience will

illustrate how the system works in practice. To speak only from the base

of one's own experience is both good manners and good pedagogy in

Cree terms. M y questions were answered seriously in part because I

appeared to be a relationally impoverished person, having grown up

without extended family and having lost both m y parents so that I was

raising m y own children without (genealogical) grandparents. A n orphan

is at severe disadvantage in this society. I received considerable

sympathy for m y efforts to construct a family for myself and for my

children.

(1) The old couple with w h o m I first lived decided that I should call

her nimis 'my older sister'. She said, giggling like a school girl, that this

made her feel young; she was in her early sixties at the time. Besides,

should I want a reason worthy of being recorded in m y ubiquitous

notebook (which also sent her into fits of giggles), w e shared the

household work as sisters should do. That is, Mary Rose was a

functionalist in her kinship attributions.

(2) Her husband, ten years older, became nipdpd 'my father'; this

is the usual informal term in the community, adding a Cree possessive

prefix to the French term. The old man took responsibility for m e as a

father would for his daughter; I was at the time a single woman. M y

father and I were intimate within the household but without sexual

ambiguity. This was safer, for all of us, than his being m y brother-in-

law, the term that would seem to follow from his wife's being m y older sister.

(3) The old lady's niece, one generation removed, was also her

daughter-in-law. Preferential cross-cousin marriage, as reported for

earlier times, may have reinforced the sense that there was nothing

remarkable about being related in these two different ways. In practice,

the two women used consanguineal terms when they were friendly and


affinal terms when they quarrelled (which happened fairly frequently).

The more intimate relationship was explained in terms of remembering

the ties to their shared "home place" rather than any conviction that

marrying into a family in another community was less "relational" than

being a member by birth.

(4) Eventually, I settled on "older sister" for the "niece/daughter-in-

law" of m y (much older) "older sister". There was a term for the oldest

sister in the family, but this had to be reserved for the older sister of m y

first older sister w h o lived across the road; only one person in a set of

siblings could be called by this term, which in any case was used almost

exclusively in reference. The two old ladies, of course, preserved the

older sister and younger sibling distinction, reflecting a year's difference

in their ages (63 and 62 when I met them).

(5) I usually called this oldest sister by her first name (which was

used by almost no one else in the community). W e never came to think

of ourselves as related except through our mutual sibling. It bothered

her, I think, that her younger sister, by virtue of her fluent English

learned in the mission school while this w o m a n stayed home to care for

younger children, had access to a prestigious visitor; she was margina

lized in spite of her status as the older sister. She was also very "shy"

(the word used in English within the community) around outsiders. I

was, however, an "auntie" (usually used in English) to the five-year-old

granddaughter this w o m a n was raising. W h e n the old lady and I spoke

directly, the granddaughter translated; her grandmother did not want to

deal with m y efforts to speak Cree. The child did not speak any English

when she began kindergarten a few months before I met her. At school

her lack of English fluency was a major problem; she repeated kinder

garten. At home, however, she was seen as a person of considerable

competence for her age because she was her grandmother's access to the

non-Cree portion of the community, in practice mostly the school.

(6) The husband of m y younger older sister occasionally made

passes at me, a fact known to all the w o m e n and considered not to be m y

fault. I was instructed to call him nipdpdsis 'my little father', an effort

to disambiguate the relationship and make him behave as a protective

male relative.

42 REGNA DARNELL

(7) Somewhat parenthetically, because only old ladies (and men, of

course) smoke pipes, children in the community called m e "granny",

accompanied by giggles. Their elders picked up "granny" when I

persisted in talking to old people and more to men than young Cree

women normally do.

Then there's Grandma. She is m y children's grandmother, the only

one they will ever have, which she knows and takes very seriously. But

she is not m y mother. I introduce her to m y university friends, mostly

students, as "our [i.e., the family's] grandmother, Mrs. Thompson". For

m e to use her first name would be disrespectful because she is an old

lady, though not old enough to be m y grandmother. After over a year of

teaching Cree language together, but before she began to care for my

children when I could not because of m y job, she asked permission to use

m y first name rather than academic title. I had repeatedly invited her to

do so previously. She told m e that this was reasonable because "I'm so

much older than you are." (She is a year older than m y older sister in

the first example, and they grew up in the same community.) Anyway,

I avoided calling her anything (Goffman's "no-naming" stage of

interactional intimacy) until m y children's relationship to her allowed me

to call her "your grandmother".

Interestingly enough, the children also called her 'your grandmother',

kohkom, imitating their parents, without realizing that their own grand

mother should be nohkom. She did not attempt to correct them. In

reference, of course, she called herself kohkom and they failed to note the

obligatory grammatical reciprocity of terms. I asked her to speak Cree

to them, but she was also "watching" her sister's son along with my

oldest son; her daughter remembered Grade One in English with such

pain that she wanted her son to leam English. Thus, conversation with

the babies was in English, although almost all other conversation in the household was in Cree.

Grandma does not know (in the sense of having a personal relation

ship with) anyone who is not family. This means that she could not look

after m y children until they became her grandchildren, that is, related to

her. Eventually she settled on daughter-in-law for me; I was like a

daughter to her but she did not raise me. Since such matters are

dyadically constructed, this had nothing to do with the (non-)existence of


a man w h o might serve as a linking relative. Grandma's husband, when

he called m e anything, which he rarely did, being a polite elderly Cree

man, called m e his daughter, though I was more than a decade older than

his only daughter. Again, avoidance of sexual ambiguity seemed to be

the crucial variable. Also again, I was not consistently related to

marriage partners, though both became m y relatives. For m y children,

however, the relationship to kohkom and her husband as their grand

parents was symmetrical. They usually called him by his first name but

referred to him as (ni)mosom 'grandfather'.

All of this took longer to work out because it had to be done in the

city rather than in a home community where relational terms are more

publicly used and, to the extent that it is necessary, negotiated. In

Edmonton, the decisions were matters of private behaviour. Nevertheless,

in the city, a deliberate effort is made to make social life as relational as

possible. One time over tea at her kitchen table, Grandma, apropos of

nothing I could identify, said: "I guess you read the Edmonton lournalT

"Ehe", I replied fairly cautiously, waiting for the context she did not want

to impose on me. After a pause, she continued: "I read the Sun. It has

more news." After an even longer pause, she continued: "The Edmonton

lournal has all that foreign stuff — and politics — and business. The

Sun tells you which Seven-Eleven was robbed and who got mugged on

Jasper Avenue" (most recently, right next to the Bingo). For Grandma,

"news" is about people, preferably known people, although known (local)

places will do in a pinch. Grandma is a symbolic interactionist in her

theory of kinship. The salience of this highly flexible and variably applied Cree kinship

system for structuring all human relationships calls into question the

universality of dimensions of social interaction. Roger Brown (1965 and

elsewhere) has suggested that authority or status and intimacy or

solidarity are basic to all known systems of address. In many European

languages, the expressive domain is familiar vs. formal pronouns. In

English it is first name vs. title/last name. In Cree, the first question is whether a kin term is used at all, then

whether that term is symmetrical or reciprocal (i.e., whether it implies

distance and respect or intimacy). This distinction has a vastly different

valence in Cree than in English. Cree people do not share the cheerful

44 REGNA DARNELL

mainstream North American assumption that social relationships must, or

even should, progress toward mutual (symmetrical) first names. White

people are seen as unrealistic and hypocritical when they insist that

closeness is only possible through social identification with equals. For

Cree people, such distinctions as relative age or gender are givens and

properly result in more respectful treatment of one party by another.

Intimacy is a question of proper respect for differences among autono

mous people as the basis of their relationship. Solidarity based on equal

status is possible in a few kinds of relationship, quintessentially brothers-

in-law or sisters. This is significant precisely because it is not character

istic of social relationship in general. O n the other hand, asymmetrical

relations can be extremely intimate, though still based on respect and a

considerable degree of formality. The license and ease of grandparents

and grandchildren is the most salient example. Status or respect does not

imply authority over others. Indeed, Cree people are adamant in

respecting the autonomy of people, even small children. Brown's

universals may indeed exist, but the parameters of solidarity and status,

intimacy and distance, are defined in culture-specific terms.

Because every known person is considered some kind of a relative,

kinship obligation varies considerably among those referred to by a given

set of terms of reference and address. The more complex and interesting

question is what are the properties of a valued social relationship. There

is no middle ground between becoming a relative and remaining an outsider.

Any relationship, symmetrical or not, requires assurance that there

will be no closure; the relationship is ongoing through time. W h e n our

family left for a summer in Africa, Grandma was worried because it was

so far away and there were wars there; she tied us to her by offering to

keep a coat for m e until w e returned, saying that she had plenty of room

for it (in the hall closet of her one-bedroom apartment, considerably

smaller than m y rambling acreage house). It was a reassurance of

continuity; I would want to retrieve m y coat as soon as w e returned.

Like relatives, friends w h o become kin do not go away. Fledgling

anthropologists are instructed to study language, record genealogies and

take a community census. By the time that is done, they will be able to

figure out what to do next. All three of these conventional tasks are


more complicated than they appear at first glance. But the community

census is particularly indeterminate. I still have no idea (how to explain)

how many people live in the communities where I have lived and visited.

It depends. I can, usually, explain who is there at a given time and why.

There are almost always more people who could be there. But only in

the context of the likelihood of their coming would anyone think to enumerate them.

Then there are people who happen to be around but are not of the

place. I helped celebrate the 80th birthday of an old Scotsman who lived

for some time with a local woman; when she ran off, he stayed in the

community and raised his son, who had long since moved away, leaving

his father behind.

People come home when they are unemployed or have family

problems in the city or on other reserves. They come home to leave their

children with grandparents so that they can take jobs away from home.

They come home to retire. They come to visit when the fancy strikes or

when the means of travel are available. And they come when there is an

occasion in the life of the family or the community — usually this means

a birth, a wedding or, especially, a funeral. Memory and continuing

interaction go together to remind individuals, families and communities

that they are all related one way or another.

The people who come to funerals and other events almost all have the

right to be there. W h e n they are in the community, people will say that

they live there, though they have been "away". Some may stay for

substantial periods and are not considered visitors, though they have

homes elsewhere. Answers to the question "who lives here?" vary

considerably depending on the circumstances and the person asked.

Individuals are expected to change as they move through the life

cycle, but the relationships of their dyadic kinship ties remain stable.

People say: "You know where you are, what you can expect of someone,

when you have a kinship relation to them." It is good for people not to

be uncertain about their mutual obligations and rights. Kinship metaphors

specify the nature of specific dyadic relationships. They also locate a

particular relational dyad within the framework of community obligation

and the essential interdependence of all people (actually, all living beings,

46 REGNA DARNELL

but that is a more complex question — e.g., m y grandfather the bear, my

elder brother the eagle, and so on). Relatives are always possessed by someone. Theoretically, it is

possible to use the prefix mi- meaning someone's whatever. I have never

heard this used spontaneously by any Cree person. O n e does not speak

about motherhood but about someone's mother. The abstract forms

(when posed by the visiting anthropologist) are perceived as uproariously

funny, incomprehensible except as white folks' sillinesses. If kinship is

about the organization of social relationships, then w e should not be

surprised to find that it is meaningless outside the context of its perfor

mance in those very social relationships.

Cree kinship is not consistent in its componential features. Because

of the essential asymmetry of social relations, different features are

stressed in different parts of the network of kin reciprocity. For the

grandparent relationship, the primary terminological and interactional

focus is generation. Grandchildren are not distinguished by sex, nor are

great grandparents. The difference in age defines the ease and intimacy

coupled with respect. Sex and actual age do not come into this equation.

At one generation removed from ego, however, sex is crucial, both

relative and absolute. This is the generation of reproduction and active

work. Relative age is emphasized among siblings: the older must

nurture the younger, while the younger must respect the elder. This

pattern of caretaking is established in childhood in the family of origin

but maintained throughout life.

Cross and parallel relations are crucial in the parent generation

because of ties to marriage partners in one's o w n generation, at least

potentially in the traditional system, still intelligible to contemporary

consultants. Cross-cousins have license otherwise unattested between the

sexes. Nitimos 'my cross-cousin of the opposite sex' is usually glossed

in English as 'my sweetheart'. The cross-cousin terminology does not

distinguish between consanguines and affines. Again, kinship is more than biological relationship.

Furthermore, affinal terms, and the social relationships which

accompany them, almost always survive the breakup of a marriage.

Divorce is private, the business of the persons w h o used to be married.

The continued incorporation of their children within the network of


relatives is public, the business of those relatives. It is pursued tena

ciously and cannot be overruled by the wishes of the formerly married

parents.

Within the immediate family, emotional affinity does not affect the

terms used. The system specifies that parallel relatives are intimate,

while cross relatives are respectful and more formal. In the latter case,

actual avoidance is often still practised.

Terms are modified, however, if relatives are particularly close

personally or if the relative has been significant in someone's life. A

closer term than the actual relationship is used: stepmother or mother's

sister may be called "mother", or cousins (cross-cousins traditionally,

today more often parallel as well) may become siblings. For parents, the

vocative may express exceptional intimacy.

Terms of reference and terms of address are often quite different.

The life cycle terms may be insulting in direct address but are used fairly

frequently in reference, particularly for those addressed as grandparents

(e.g., "that old man, m y grandfather, he..."). Grandparents, of course,

belong to the whole community. They are its respected teachers. The

word for 'ancestors', nimosomipanak, means "the grandfathers w h o have

died". There are also terms for the position of siblings within the family

which are used only for reference. M a n y people think these are

somewhat silly because they are not relational, as kinship relations ought

to be.

Proper names are seldom used among the Cree and great effort is

made to construct an appropriate kinship relation within which to

structure a social relationship. One extends kinship within the family to

intensify certain bonds on a dyadic basis. The system itself incorporates

relatives by equation of siblings which may always be carried further by

mutual agreement. Strangers are incorporated within the same network

so that they know h o w to treat people and people know how to treat

them. Names have some danger by virtue of power ties to personness

and self-ness is kept to oneself. In social relations, kin terms are

preferable forms of address precisely because they are relational. A kin

relation is different from any other kind of social role in which a given

individual functions.

48 REGNA DARNELL

All of these things seem, I suppose, to any anthropologist who has

experienced the emergence of relationship within any similar community,

so obvious as not to require elaboration. Yet I cannot find much in our

literature that lays out the pragmatics of what kinship is used for, of what

social relations among known persons in small communities ideally and

actually are like. It is private behaviour, structured by deep-rooted

assumptions about the obligations of social relationship, that provides

security for the individual within a family and a community. Social order

and corporate identity are built up out of intersections of relationships

based on kinship.

I have followed Cree interactional etiquette in this discussion of Cree

kinship in action in that I have talked about m y o w n experience. In part,

of course, this is because I want to emphasize the dynamic process rather

than the static structure. But it is also because m y understanding of

relationships is relative to m y own experience. Cree people are generally

comfortable when I (or anyone else) talk(s) about personal experience.

It is the distanced, objective, non-relational approach of most social

science writing that disconcerts people and makes them feel like bugs

under a microscope. That is quite the opposite of living in relationships

of kinship to most if not all known persons.

APPENDIX: THE TERMS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS

Most Cree people begin their discussion of kin terms with the very old and the very young.

nimosom grandfather

great grandfather

male sibling of any grandparent

nohkom grandmother

great grandmother

female sibling of any grandparent

nicapan great grandparent of either sex (so old it doesn' t matter; highly

respected; term is formal and rarely used)

nimosomipanak ancestors (grandfathers who have died; in practice, includes

grandmothers) (-ipan, any relative who is deceased, plural -ak)

Life cycle terms are derogatory in address, even for non-relatives. They are sometimes used in reference.


kisiyiniw old man

nocikwesiw old w o m a n

The more neutral term for 'person' or 'Indian person' is unmarked as

positive or negative except by context.

ayisiyiniw man, person

nehiyaw Indian person (with his/her own language; a moral as well as

an ethnic identification)

Grandchild terms are not specified by age or sex.

nosisim grandchild

children of nephews and nieces (same relationship but more

distant linking relative)

nitdniskotdpan great grandchild (many links between related individuals)

The only vocatives are for parents; they are used only in very intimate

relationships.

nohtdwiy father (vocative nohtd, great intimacy)

nikdwiy mother (vocative nekd, great intimacy)

Parent terms are sometimes used to older adults as a sign of respect, in the

appropriate generational category.

nindpem my husband

riiwa I niwikimdkan m y wife

nikihci-wikihtowin m y wedded spouse

The following terms are generational, with the elders also specified by sex.

Only with two generations' removal is generation alone sufficient to specify kin

roles and obligations.

nohkomis father's brother

mother's sister's husband

foster father

nbhcawis little father, alternative for great intimacy

nitosis mother's sister

father's brother's wife

foster mother

nikdwis little mother, alternative for great intimacy

50 R E G N A D A R N E L L

The following are the closest of any relatives to one's o w n parents. Linking

relatives must be of the same sex.

nisikos father's sister

mother's brother's wife

mother-in-law

nisis mother's brother

father's sister's husband

father-in-law

Spouses in this generation are treated as siblings of parents.

Cross-sex links are treated with distance and respect. Traditionally, in-law

avoidance was practised. In-laws would already be related in the traditional

cross-cousin preferential marriage system; e.g., a father-in-law would also be a

mother's brother.

nitihtdwdw parent of child's spouse (either sex)

co-parent-in-law (bound by grandchildren)

Marriage involved whole families, not just individuals. Such relations

normally survived the breakup of marriage.

nikosis son

nitdnis daughter

ninahdhkisim son-in-law

ninahdhkiskwem daughter-in-law (-iskwew 'female, woman')

-hkawin any adopted relative

nikdwihkawin adopted mother (not intimate)

godmother (surrogate parent through church)

There were no formal adoption ceremonies. Adoption was frequent and gifts given to mark it.

nimis older sister

nistes older brother

nisimis younger brother or sister

Sex of younger siblings is not marked, though the relative age terms apply

throughout life. One should nurture younger siblings and respect older siblings.

The following terms are rarely used in address. In reference, they describe the structure of the family as a whole.

nisimisak all younger siblings


nitisdnak

ostesimdw

omisimdw

osimimdw

osimimds

all siblings

eldest brother

eldest sister

youngest sibling (often stayed with parents)

alternative, more emotional term

Terms of direct address:

nitim woman to brother-in-law

man to sister-in-law

riistdw man to brother-in-law

man to wife's brother

man to sister's husband

man to male cross-cousin

man to any close friend

w o m a n to sister-in-law

Women were expected to have fewer ties outside the immediate family.

nitisan nitisdniskwem

nitawemdw

man to brother

w o m a n to sister

man to sister

w o m a n to brother

Cross-sex siblings were distant after about age 10.

Cross relatives were potential spouses.

nitosim nikosis

nitosimiskwem

nitihkwatim

nistim

son of man's brother

son of woman's sister

daughter of man's brother

daughter of woman's sister

son of man's sister

son of woman's brother

daughter of man's sister

daughter of woman's brother

These terms are no longer in full use. They are not paralleled in English and the

former cross-cousin marriage preference no longer applies, lessening the need for

cross/parallel distinctions. All cousins, especially cross cousins, could be addressed as siblings. This

reflected intimacy. Second cousin (children of cousins) terms are now often used

for first cousins. The only exception is:

52 R E G N A D A R N E L L

nitimos cross cousin (mother's brother's daughter for a man or

mother's brother's son for a woman)

This is a joking relationship with an extended meaning of 'sweetheart', though

actual cross-cousin marriage was probably always rare.

niscds male second cousins

nicdhkos female second cousins

nitimos cross cousins, second as well as first

Cousin terms are easily extended. Parallel cousins are sibling-like in intimacy.

Cross cousins are more distant and respectful in spite of the ritualized joking.

Traditional terms no longer in use due to the absence of polygamy:

nitayim co-wife

nikosdk co-husband

nikawis wife of father other than mother, now used for mother's sister

nohcdwis stepfather, now used for father's brother

Terms for affinal relatives were extended to siblings of that person, e.g., a

sister's husband and his brother were both called male cross cousin. Equation

of siblings allows closer kin terms.

General life cycle terms (reference only):

niwdhkdmdkanak

niwicewdkanak

nitotemak

ndpew

iskwew

ndpesis

iskwesis

oskinikiskwew

oskinikiw

osk-dwdsis

awdsis

osk-dyak

mosdpew

mosiskwew

m y relatives (excluding spouse)

m y friends, pals (may include spouse)

close friends, like family

man woman

boy, little man (up to about 12)

girl, little woman (up to about 12)

young woman, until marriage (oski- 'new')

young man, until marriage

newborn baby

child

young people

bachelor (without a woman)

spinster (after about 20)

Cree kin terms are inalienably possessed. All terms are given with first person

singular possessor (ni-) except terms of reference.


REFERENCES

Brown, Roger. 1965. Social psychology. New York: Free Press. Mandelbaum, David G. 1940. The Plains Cree. New York: American Museum of

Natural History. Sapir, Edward. 1949 [1933]. The psychological reality of the phoneme. Selected

writings of Edward Sapir, ed. by David Mandelbaum (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press), 46-60.

cree kinship semantics as interaction

Documents