In a matrilineal society, when I married, my last name would change, not my wife's. Indigenous people the world over, specifically in the western hemisphere, never gave a new-born child the name of someone else, because that would not respect that someone else, and because you want that child, who just came into this earth, to have their own personality and individuality, their own freedom. It's respecting the individual. This country was based on the clan system. The United States of America doesn't have founding fathers. That's an insult to our ancestors. This country, the United States of America, has founding mothers, and they were primitive ones at that. The Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy used to be called at that time the Five Nations. The men didn't have the right to vote. It was the women who picked the leaders and removed them if necessary. It continues today among those people. That's the basis of this country. If the white man was really telling the truth, he would talk about the founding mothers. But women had no rights when this country was founded, black people were counted as three-fifths of a human being, and we weren't considered human beings. - Russell Means, lecture at Navajo Community College, 1995
