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The Mohave Indians are very fond of children and treat them with exceptional kindness. They do not think of children primarily as an old age insurance, or as suitable objects for the outpouring of parental affection. Rather do they view them as a means for insuring the continuity of the tribe and of the lineage, which is among the most fundamental values of Mohave culture.1 Hence the extinction of a lineage is thought of as a great calamity, and is believed to be a punishment for violations of the incest prohibition2 or of some other major taboo.
It is therefore not without interest to analyse the motivational structure of infanticide, since such an analysis is bound to focus our attention on other cultural values which are powerful enough to counteract, on occasion, the Mohave Indian's desire to have children.
In puritanical societies abortion and infanticide are often motivated by the desire to conceal the sexual “delinquencies” of an unmarried girl. Since Mohave society did not interfere to any appreciable extent with extramarital sexual behavior, this motivation is conspicuous only in the case of Mohave schoolgirls, who are under the direct control of Agency officials.
Mohave society did not discriminate either against the unmarried mother, nor against the illegitimate child as such. The term “humatck” (found), which designated children whose fathers were not known, cannot be considered as an equivalent of our term “bastard”, since it does not carry any one of the opprobrious connotations of that term, and does not appear to be used as an insult in verbal clashes. The Mohave feel that the White man's attitude toward illegitimacy is both a brutal and an unenlightened one, and my account of related discriminatory practices among the Yurok and the Kwakiutl Indians plunged my Mohave audience into a half amused, and half puzzled, consternation.