In the end it is the arguments of the elders over the young that prevails: the tribe must move on from their ancestral lands. More than that, knowing that the world is changing and that there surely must be other tribes desperately clinging to the remaining good hunting grounds, the people must seek out another place that would have been considered unsuitable in the past. A bit of trading with the valley people is enough to learn some of their secrets and obtain some of their seeds, but the true challenge is to find a place suited to this new way of life. Two winters pass before a place is found, a valley between hills rich in grass but poor in more edible plants, shunned for its habit of flooding at the time of year when the best game would be available, and it is finally settled that the tribe should move there.
There are perhaps better places to be, and some break away from the tribe when they find the work of farming to be not to their liking, but the tribe itself survives and grows, reversing the decline it had been in. Generations pass, and as they recognize their river valley home as being lush and fertile in all the best ways, the tale the elders tell of the migration there is not one of exile, but of finding a new home. Of course, there are many ways to tell the same story, and what is important is not the exact sequence of events, but the lessons imparted to the next generation. Some elders speak of the wisdom of choosing not to fight and instead cutting your own path when you come to disagreement with others. Others speak of the rewards of hard work, of how the land was transformed into the lovely garden in which the tribe now lives. Still others emphasize how it was the people of the valley where they originally dwelt that drove them away because they were unneighbourly.
By the time living memory has faded from living memory, only one of these interpretations remains.
Choose a Social Value...
[] Make My Own!
[] Caretakers of the Land
[] Sacred Hospitality
As the river valley begins to fill with farming plots and the number of people grow, something curious begins to happen. Those with the best land, usually because they inherited from ancestors who were spoiled for choice, are able to grow more food than those farming on less ideal plots, allowing them to accumulate more in good times and bad, and allowing them to raise more children, who can both better work the land in youth and act as voices for their clans in the tribe meetings. Some families are just accumulating too much power, and it is upsetting those who work just as hard but were not lucky enough to inherit the best land from their ancestors. Already tempers are flaring, and fights are breaking out. Worse yet, the families who would have been singular and commanding voices in generations past are now competing with each other in increasingly escalating ways.
Something must give way, and people say so at a summer meeting that tradition and the glares of the elders can increasingly not control. Some decry the greed and avarice of their fellow man, and call upon them to cease their hording and scheming ways and to commit to charity among the tribe, to demonstrate their wealth by giving it away. Others suggest that the tribe has lost its way, that even though who tends the land has gone down through families the land is land and food is food. Most people assist each other with planting and harvest anyway, so since everything is a communal effort the rewards should also be brought together as a community. Somewhat unsurprisingly, those who benefit the most from the way that the system is set up currently state that things are fine and such reorganizations imposed by the jealousy of others are doomed to breed more strife than they hope to solve. Of course, despite the wealth of family their lands bring them, they cannot simply shout over the others, and they seek to bring those discontent with the distribution of fields into their camps so as to get force for their own ideas of political reform.
A popular sentiment among a certain sort is the idea that the council should be reduced so that not everyone has a voice directly, but that each clan should have their own chief and the meetings are of a council of chiefs who can represent the needs of their kin, dealing with in-clan problems that do not affect the others more quickly. Others, particularly those courting the voices of those in the communal growing and distribution of food camps, seek to go even further, and propose a sort of chief of chiefs, a big man whose primary duty is to deal with the problems of the tribe first and foremost. Of course, resistance to change is considerable, but even among the more traditional types the idea of simply reducing the number of people who can speak has an appeal for the growing population, with the moderate position between some of the more radical changes in composition being to simply reduce who can speak to elders who have accumulated many decades of wisdom and the favour of ancestors and spirits, as evidenced by their continued survival.
Or nothing can be done.
Economic Change...
[] Pressure for Charity
[] Communal Distribution for Communal Effort
[] Families Tend the Land
Political Change...
[] A Big Man is Needed!
[] A Council of Chiefs
[] A Council of Elders
[] No Need for Change
