and lasting. At first he would not even speak to them. For a year or so, not one of them dared to ask to be taken on overseas expeditions by him, although they were fully entitled to this privilege. Two years later, in 1917, when I returned to the Trobriands, Namwana Guya'u was still resident in the other village and keeping aloof from his father's kinsmen, though he frequently visited Omarakana in order to be in attendance on his father, especially when To'uluwa went abroad. His mother had died within a year after his expulsion. As the natives described it: "She wailed and wailed, refused to eat, and died." The relations between the two main enemies were completely broken, and Mitakata, the young chieftain who had been imprisoned, had repudiated his wife, who belonged to the same sub-clan as Namwana Guya'u. There was a deep rift in the whole social life of Kiriwina.
This incident was one of the most dramatic which I have ever witnessed in the Trobriands. I have described it at length, as it contains a striking illustration of the nature of mother-right, of the power of tribal law, and of the passions which work against and in spite of these. It shows also the deep, personal attachment which a father feels for his children, the tendency which he has to use all his personal influence to give them a strong position in the village, the opposition which this always evokes among his maternal kinsmen, and the tension and rifts thus brought about. Under normal conditions, in a smaller community where the contending powers are humbler and less important, such tension would merely mean that, after the father's death, the children would
