Hasyuthin
The Hasyuthin - its name meaning "Our Tribes" - is the organizing quasi-government of the many family units of the Niechela people.
Structure
The Hasyuthin is organized geographically and organically. Each syuth chooses a member to make the trek to join the Syuth Parin when the meeting is called or writes a zban (letter) giving the bearer the right to speak for them and a listing of their concerns and positions.
Public Agenda
The Hasyuthin exist for four reasons:
Peace
The Hasyuthin exists to foster peace among the many syuth of the Plains. This is done by the Bratha, unwed warrior women whose sole goal is to ensure that any outbreak of violence is ended swiftly and with deadly force. The threat of the Bratha's existence stops most feuds from escalating past harsh words.
Laws
The second function of the Hasyuthin is the enforcement of the few laws that the syuth representatives have agreed on. Typically this is done by sending a letter of complaint to the Bratham nearest to you, personally or by traveler, and the Bratham dispatches a band of Bratha to you to deal with whatever lawbreaking has been done.
Culture
The Hasyuthin stands to keep the cultural standards that they started with centuries ago, accepting outsiders but refuting their influence on the Niechela's culture and way of life. The Hasyuthin believe that no crisis less than the Cataclysm that forced them to this life should shake them from it.
Should a young woman choose, she could travel the breadth of the western plains, crossing rivers and going through the central plains, and find herself a husband on the eastern edge of the world if the Hasyuthin has done its job enforcing the cultural standards of its spiritual founder Eis Everwise.
Religion
The Hasyuthin exists because any group with so many moving parts cannot exist in perpetuity without breaking down. To bind every syuth together the Hasyuthin enforce the remembrance, but not worship, of the Zun. Five are remembered in stories, song, and music and are commonly called the Vaga Zun. Those five are Batu Aiba, Batu Desh, Batu Jun, Batu Kaedh, and Batu Zha, and are recognized as the crafters of the sun and moons. Any other Zun, or Stubtu, the Niechela encounter must, by law, be preserved in memory by story, song, or statuary for the altars.
Assets
In recent years the Hasyuthin have created a special house in the center
History
The word syuth is the Hamusu term for a tribe, but the Hasyuthin is the term taken by the first K'vut refugees who landed on the Western Plains. They were a motley group of unrelated individuals who had formed strong bonds while fleeing the disasters that wracked their homelands. When they made landfall, the initial reaction was to split up.
But one wife, a woman named Eis Fyakri took charge. She had lost everything during the disaster and the voyage. Eis had started out life poor and had scrambled to attain what she had, but she had a K'vutan spirit and would not be broken. She used the pidgin language that had been built up to communicate among the different refugees to talk to them all, and she united them in a plan. On these wide open plains, she spoke of exploring, building, and making not a nation like they had known before, but focusing on family. They would rebuild what had been lost by sharing. She separated people into small units, and as more women survived the journey than men, she said that men would build and raise children and that women would hunt the game of these wide plains.
Few joined her at first. Some young women, a few older men, and some of the academically minded men. It didn't matter - she declared these followers to be her tribe, her syuth. She ran the others off, keeping the majority of the supplies. As the others wandered into the plains, she and her followers built the first of the nla, their new homes. Intelligently designed, cunningly hidden, the nla was invisible from a distance. Gathering and hunting trips provided that first syuth with plenty and taught them how to survive. The men built and crafted and tended the animals and crops, making more than their syuth needed. The women hunted and herded and gathered the wild plants, learning their features and giving them names in that creole tongue they had come to use.
Soon enough, when the herds moved on from easy hunting, the other refugees came back. The first group to return were accepted with open arms - provided they accepted the Eis' rules and the way of life they used. The group agreed, and married one of their young men to one of the hunters in Eis' syuth. Within a season they were taught to live Eis' way. Eis dubbed those who followed the semi-nomadic way Niechela, or Far Voyagers, in honor of how far they had come and how they would travel farther still. Within that time, Eis and her hunters had found another good spot for a nla that met all the needs her builders asked for. Eis' syuth moved on, herding their animals towards the new spot and rebuilt everything over again. Within a season, two more groups had found Eis, and another had found Eis' original home, and the first two syuth taught them the Myum, Eis' way of living and doing things. In time, more nla were built, identical to the first, and more bands of the Jienain (all-women hunters) formed among these groups.
Eventually every refugee became one of the Niechela syuthin. Eis' cultural paradigm changed everything and each syuth operated separately. A wide-spanning federation of families of the Niechela formed after Eis' death, three hundred years ago. Though in practice this "single tribe" is actually distributed among the thousands of ineit where the men, children, and sometimes women make their homes.
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