The hopeless sterility of the region and its poverty of game kept its destitute inhabitants constantly on the move to gather in the meager food supply, and often restricted the social group to the family.[84] Here the bond between land and tribe, and hence between the members of the tribe, was the weakest possible.
[Sidenote: Land bond in hunter tribes.] The usual type of tribal ownership was presented by the Comanches, nomadic horse Indians who occupied the grassy plains of northern Texas.
They held their territory and the game upon it as the common property of the tribe, and jealously guarded the integrity of their domain.[85] The chief Algonquin tribes, who occupied the territory between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, had each its separate domain, within which it shifted its villages every few years; but its size depended upon the power of the tribe to repel encroachment upon its hunting grounds.
Relying mainly on the chase and fishing, little on agriculture, for their subsistence, their relations to their soil were superficial and transitory, their tribal organization in a high degree unstable.[86] Students of American ethnology generally agree that most of the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi were occupying definite areas at the time of the discovery, and were to a considerable extent sedentary and agricultural.

Though nomadic within the tribal territory, as they moved with the season in pursuit of game, they returned to their villages, which were shifted only at relatively long intervals.[87] The political organization of the native Australians, low as they were in the social scale, seems to have been based chiefly on the claim of each wretched wandering tribe to a definite territory.[88] In north central Australia, where even a very sparse population has sufficed to saturate the sterile soil, tribal boundaries have become fixed and inviolable, so that even war brings no transfer of territory.

Land and people are identified.

The bond is cemented by their primitive religion, for the tribe's spirit ancestors occupied this special territory.[89] In a like manner a very definite conception of tribal ownership of land prevails among the Bushmen and Bechuanas of South Africa; and to the pastoral Hereros the alienation of their land is inconceivable.[90] [See map page 105.] A tribe of hunters can never be more than a small horde, because the simple, monotonous savage economy permits no concentration of population, no division of labor except that between the sexes, and hence no evolution of classes.

The common economic level of all is reflected in the simple social organization,[91] which necessarily has little cohesion, because the group must be prepared to break up and scatter in smaller divisions, when its members increase or its savage supplies decrease even a little.