Comanche Society: Before the Reservation

Conclusion

Conclusion S tudents of Comanche behavior have tended to understand it as the result of an adaptation to various environmental conditions. This type of interpretation has given rise to the perception that Comanche society developed in response to the climatic and economic circumstances of the Great Basin prior to 1706 and of the southern Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to this way of thinking, Comanches’ historical behavior should be understood as a consequence of the interaction between the environment and the group. Unfortunately, the social organization of a group does not determine people’s actions. Rather, the structure is an effect of human social and kinship behavior. The fundamental basis of social behavior is the kinship behavior parents demonstrate in sacrificing their interests in favor of their child’s. Social behavior implies a sacrifice of one’s interests in favor of the interests of another. Chief Ecueracapa demonstrated this when he offered his three sons to the Spanish for military service against the Apaches. In this case, he literally sacrificed his and his sons’ interests in favor of the welfare of Gov. Juan Bautista de Anza and Spanish New Mexico. Anza did not misunderstand the social nature of this act. He responded in kind by charging his soldiers to “look after and attend [the young Comanches] with great goodwill and kindness.”1 The social behavior involved in the parent-child relationship is ultimately based on kinship. Comanches used kin terms and clan, or family, names to identify their ancestors and co-descendant relatives. The use of these encouraged an 139 extension of the sacrificial behavior normally occurring between parents and children to more distantly related co-descendants. Comanches could acknowledge their common ancestry when they called distant relatives by intimate kin terms such as pávi (“older brother”) and tami (“younger brother”). Besides allowing people to recognize their common kinship, these terms also encouraged an asymmetrical form of sacrifice like that between older and younger brothers. When people’s exact birth links had become obscured over the course of time, ancestral, or clan, names like Cuchanec, Jupe, and Yamparica could be used to identify distant kin with whom people could interact socially. Thus, individuals of any of these clans could associate with anyone who traced a birth link to their particular lineage. These persons need not have shared the same name because Comanches, like other peoples, recognized clan affiliations with mothers and fathers equally. Comanches’ residential units, or camps, were good examples of the tangible “organizational” consequences of kinship social relations. As contemporary observers noted, individual Comanches freely withdrew from and united with camps at their convenience. This behavior can best be explained as an effect of their ability to identify kindred and to interact with them socially. Thus, Comanches freely congregated with individuals whom they identified as codescendant , whether they shared the same clan name or not. Individuals who identified themselves as a member of one clan—like Cuchanec—could have lived in camps associated with any other if they could trace descent from the ancestor of those camps. Besides facilitating social behavior among Comanches, their kinship behavior also served as the fundamental impetus bringing them together into residential camp groups. Because Comanche names such as Jupe, Cuchanec, Yamparica, and Tenewa represented kinship connections between people, their existence depended on the continuation of these relationships. Comanches traced their ancestry through the male line. Therefore, the reproduction of sons was necessary and sufficient for the existence of a clan name. The history of the Jupe Comanches especially demonstrates how clans could become diminished and subject to extinction. The intermittent warfare between Comanches and New Mexicans from the 1760s to the 1780s probably initiated this ancestral group’s disappearance from the province. Warfare, conflict with rival kinsmen, drought, and disease apparently had a detrimental affect on the male members of the Jupe family. A high number of deaths among them would have left fewer men to father descendants inheriting that particular clan name. Although the Jupe family ultimately endured, their history emphasizes the inherent fragility of human clans. The appearance of new Comanche lineages throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred apart from the demise of former clans. The dissolution of close consanguineous ties, geographical isolation, and intermarriage with other peoples all contributed to the genesis of new Comanche clans. The 140 / Comanche Society eastern branch of the Cuchanec family living in Texas and Oklahoma...