by the time European settlers encountered Indigenous Americans (and the "indigenous critique," see separate notes), Indigenous America already had a "specific political history: a history in which questions of hereditary power, revealed religion, personal freedom and the independence of women were still very much matters of self-conscious debate, and in which the overall direction, for [...] three centuries at least, had been explicitly anti-authoritarian" (482)
worth noting that even though the Osage "ascribed key roles to sacred knowledge in their political affairs," they "in no sense saw their social structure as something given from on high but rather as a series of legal and intellectual discoveries [or] breakthroughs" (480)
they were "keenly aware of alternative political possibilities, [and] saw their own social orders as self-conscious creations, designed as a barrier" (against cultural outcomes like Cahokia, see separate notes)
see also the Gayanashagowa