It does irk me the way tankies and other leftists speak about Indigenous peoples' cultures here in the USA. They "ooh" and "aah" over them being "matriarchal," and it feels like a type of fetishization of these cultures where they just daydream about how much better USAmerican society would be if it were female-focused and they had Indigenous people to take care of the Earth and abolish Capitalism when landback happens.
When they talk about how great Indigenous matriarchal cultures are, they are also very distinctly vague about which tribes and cultures they actually mean. I have no doubt that this is because they have never genuinely connected with the Indigenous people around them or tried to understand these cultures beyond, "They had a matriarchy and it was great."
Plus, you can already hear all of the gender essentialism and bioessentialism leaking out of these people's mouths whenever they talk about this.
I think this is somewhat nuanced because it is true that many Indigenous cultures had more expansive or simply different views on gender than Western hegemony allows, and that many Indigenous genders were oppressed and forcibly erased by colonial instillations of the gender binary.
However, if people are genuinely saying that any Indigenous nation is matriarchal I have to put my foot down, because there is no evidence that any human culture has ever been a full-blown matriarchy.
What does exist are many nations that are matrilineal. The Diné and the Haudenosaunee are both matrilineal, which is to say that kinship is traced through the female line rather than the male. In a matrilineal society, what clan or family you belong to depends on who your mother is. Women also tend to have more power in matrilineal societies than they do in patrilineal and even many bilateral societies (“bilateral” means ancestry is traced through both sides and is the norm in most of the Western world). Nevertheless, matrilineal =/= matriarchal. Men still hold significant power in matrilineal societies, and almost invariably more than women hold in patrilineal ones.
Not all Indigenous nations are matrilineal. The Comanche are patrilineal, and the Méxica were bilateral, for two counterexamples.
I agree that thinking Indigenous people are incapable of being misogynistic is silly. That being said, I also believe any feminist movement centered on an Indigenous culture should be primarily formulated and driven by women and gender-sexual minorities from that culture, and not outsiders like me.
It’s generally a bad idea to group all Indigenous peoples together to make any kind of statement, even one intended to be flattering. Matriarchies also aren’t really something we should shoot for, because a hypothetical matriarchy would still uphold a gender binary and simply flipping the direction of oppression changes nothing. I thought it was pretty common knowledge that feminism is meant to be about equality, but I guess that is too much to ask for on the Piss on the Poor microblogging website.
