Micronesia and Melanesia:  there they are associated with dense populations and often with advanced political organization, as we find it in the feudal monarchy of Tonga and the savage Fiji Islands.[94] Fisher tribes, therefore, get an early impulse forward in civilization;[95] and even where conditions do not permit the upward step to agriculture, these tribes have permanent relations with their land, form stable social groups, and often utilize their location on a natural highway to develop systematic trade.  For instance, on the northwest coast of British Columbia and Southern Alaska, the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshean Indians have portioned out all the land about their seaboard villages among the separate families or households as hunting, fishing, and berrying grounds.  These are regarded as private property and are handed down from generation to generation.  If they are used by anyone other than the owner, the privilege must be paid for.  Every salmon stream has its proprietor, whose summer camp can be seen set up at the point where the run of the fish is greatest.  Combined with this private property in land there is a brisk trade up and down the coast, and a tendency toward feudalism in the village communities, owing to the association of power and social distinction with wealth and property in land.[96]

[Sidenote:  Land bond in pastoral societies.]

Among pastoral nomads, among whom a systematic use of their territory begins to appear, and therefore a more definite relation between land and people, we find a more distinct notion than among wandering hunters of territorial ownership, the right of communal use, and the distinct obligation of common defense.  Hence the social bond is drawn closer.  The nomad identifies himself with a certain district, which belongs to his tribe by tradition or conquest, and has its clearly defined boundaries.  Here he roams between its summer and winter pastures, possibly one hundred and fifty miles apart, visits its small arable patches in the spring for his limited agricultural ventures, and returns to them in the fall to reap their meager harvest.  Its springs, streams, or wells assume enhanced value, are things to be fought for, owing to the prevailing aridity of summer; while ownership of a certain tract of desert or grassland carries with it a certain right in the bordering settled district as an area of plunder.[97]

The Kara-Kirghis stock, who have been located since the sixteenth century on Lake Issik-Kul, long ago portioned out the land among the separate families, and determined their limits by natural features of the landscape.[98] Sven Hedin found on the Tarim River poles set up to mark the boundary between the Shah-yar and Kuchar tribal pastures.[99] John de Plano Carpini, traveling over southern Russia in 1246, immediately after the Tartar conquest, found that the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural rivers were all boundaries between domains of the various millionaries or thousands,