tribelet

plural tribelets

1. A small tribe of Native Americans, especially a small independent group of Native California people who shared a language and usually comprised one principal village, or several in close proximity, plus smaller resource-gathering camps and territories.

   The larger tribelets usually had several permanent villages.

   1978, Richard Levy, “Costanoan”, in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8 (California)

   3 more examples

   Kroeber’s emphasis on the small scale of indigenous California social organizations led him to attach the diminutive "-let" to the anthropologically normative term "tribe".

   1994, Leventhal et. al., Back from Extinction, "The Ohlone: Past and Present Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region." Ballena Press Publication, page 299–300

   The second feature, dialectic separateness, of course is an old story for California, but elsewhere in the state each idiom is usually common to a considerable number of tribelets or "village communities."

   1925, Kroeber, Alfred L. Handbook of the Indians of California. Washington, D.C: Bureau of American Ethnology: Bulletin No. 78, page 474

   Tribelet […] defined a political and geographical unit comprising several units, usually including a principal and most powerful central village, tied by relations of kinship.

   1994, Leventhal et. al., ‘’Back from Extinction’’, ibid., page 299-300

2. A small tribal society in another part of the world.

   […] if each tribelet was linguistically quite independent, this would have made communication in the New World a matter of the utmost difficulty for the [enslaved Africans], who would have been far more dependent than otherwise on the entirely new language that had to be learned.

   1941, Melville J. Herskovits, chapter 3, in The Myth of the Negro Past, New York: Harper, page 80