The Kirikirish of Texas / Oklahoma
The people who came to be known as the Wichita called
themselves the Kirikirish, “pre-eminent people.” They
spoke a Caddoan language, related to Pawnee and Arikara. W.W. Newcomb
described the Kirikirish as living in “matriarchal families”
consisting of “a woman, her husband, unmarried children, daughters
and their husbands with their children.” Sisters cooperated
in all the work of farming, tanning, making clothes, cooking and building
their thatched conical houses.
Women gave birth in a tipi. Afterward an elder woman “who was
knowledgeable about one of the important deities, Bright Shining Woman,
took the infant to a river and bathed it, while praying to her and
to another important deity, Man-Never-Known-on-Earth, for the welfare
of the child.” Bright Shining Woman was the Moon, who controlled
all life-bearing and growth. She was also called First Woman.
Earth gave birth to everything and nourished it. She gave medicine
and was associated with breath and wind, life and death. People prayed
to her before undertaking journeys. [Newcomb 8-13]
The village of Ollolai, Sardinia
The mountain village of Ollolai in the Barbagià
region of Sardinia is said to have been founded by Berbers. While
the Berbers of northwest Africa are patrilineal today, this has not
always been the case. The Guanche people of the Canary Islands, who
spoke a Berber (Imashagh) language, kept a matrilineal system until
the Spanish wiped them out in the 16th century, and that other Imashagh
speakers in north Africa, the Tuareg, are matrilineal.
Sibylle von Cles-Reden described the culture of this Sardinian hill
village in the early 1960s: “The matriarchy of Ollolai is very
far-reaching. The bridegroom does not choose the bride, but the reverse;
and a trial marriage follows. If the bridegroom does not suit, at
the conclusion of the trial period he is shown the door. If he is
allowed to remain, however, he must always address his wife as merri
mea – ‘milady.’ These practices are
all the more surprising in view of the patriarchal conditions which
prevail in the Barbagià as a whole.” [von Cles-Reden,
166]
The Xikrin of Brazil
"Xikrin families live all
together in a hierarchy of female authority — grandmother, daughters,
grand-daughters, husbands, sons, brothers—in the family hut."
An area by the village oven, behind the chief’s house, was a
female terrain.
The Xikrin have women’s societies which do body-painting and
other art. Some women choose not to marry, and enjoy sexual freedom
while farming their own plots of land. [Tschopik, 31]