Yesterday I asked a question I’ve been thinking about in one form or another for many years: What else could we become?
Tera and I had spent the night before imagining what human civilization might look like if, thousands of years ago, we had begun rewarding different parts of ourselves. What if dominance hadn’t become so deeply associated with power?
It was a thought experiment.
Then Tera reminded me of something important.
We don’t have to imagine all of it.
Human beings have already organized societies in profoundly different ways.
There has never been one human civilization marching inevitably toward the systems we live within today. Across thousands of years, people have created enormously different ways of organizing families, property, inheritance, leadership, responsibility and community.
Some of them are still here. And that changes the question.
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We often use the word matriarchy as though it simply means patriarchy with women substituted for men. But that isn’t what many of the societies we’re talking about were—or are.
Matrilineal societies trace kinship, clan identity or inheritance through the mother’s line. Matrilocal societies organize family life around the woman’s household or community after marriage.
Neither necessarily means women rule over men. And maybe that’s part of the point.
The alternative to domination doesn’t have to become domination by someone else.
Here in the Southwest, we don’t even have to look very far for examples.
Diné society is traditionally matrilineal. The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission describes matrilineality as a continuing foundation of Navajo society and traditional women’s and men’s roles as complementary rather than one simply existing beneath the other.
When Jonathan Nez was president of the Navajo Nation, he described that history while recognizing Native American women in 2019:
“Navajo women have always been the center of social, economic, and leadership positions within our culture.”
That isn’t some imagined civilization in a science-fiction future. It’s part of a living culture.
The Haudenosaunee offer another extraordinary example.
Their Confederacy still describes a system in which Clan Mothers select the men who serve as chiefs. A chief is expected to serve the people and remain accountable to them. If he begins acting selfishly or fails in his responsibilities, the Clan Mother can remove his authority.
Think about that for a moment.
A chief who stops serving his people can lose his authority.
The Clan Mother can take it away.
These days, I find that idea enormously appealing.
The Smithsonian describes Haudenosaunee society as matrilineal, with women historically exercising substantial authority over property, agriculture and family life while political responsibilities were shared.
None of this makes either society a utopia. That isn’t what I’m looking for. I’m looking at something much simpler and, to me, much more important:
Human beings have done this differently.
Yesterday, after I published my Reflection, Tera made this point in the comments. Another reader responded with a question:
Why, then, didn’t matriarchal societies become the dominant form of society?
I kept thinking about one word in that question.
Dominant.
There it was again.
The very idea I had spent the previous essay questioning.
Why didn’t another kind of society become dominant? Maybe because dominance itself is one of the assumptions we need to examine.
We tend to look backward at history and assume that whatever survived, expanded or became widespread must somehow have been inevitable. But history doesn’t work that way. Ideas don’t spread only because human beings carefully compare competing systems and select the wisest one.
Empires conquer. Governments impose laws. Land is taken. Languages are suppressed. Property systems replace other property systems. Children are taught that the beliefs and customs of their ancestors are inferior.
Religious institutions carry ideas about family, sexuality, gender and authority alongside ideas about God. And sometimes the society that becomes dominant is simply the society that became very good at dominating.
That doesn’t mean patriarchy began with colonialism or Christianity. It didn’t. Patriarchal societies existed thousands of years before Christianity, and there’s no single historical explanation for why they developed.
Human history is far messier than that.
But European colonization brought its own assumptions about gender, property, religion and political authority into societies that were sometimes organized very differently.
We have records of that happening here in the Southwest.
Spanish colonial missions encountered Indigenous cultures whose ideas about gender and family didn’t always resemble European ones. Mission systems introduced European expectations about “appropriate” roles for women and men, and Christian missionaries worked to change practices they considered incompatible with their religion.
Later American policies attacked Indigenous systems in other ways. Communally held tribal lands were divided into individual parcels. Native children were removed from their families and communities. Governments and institutions attempted to replace languages, religions, customs and systems of authority that had existed long before the United States did.
That matters when we ask why one kind of society became more widespread than another.
Prevalence is not proof of inevitability. And power is not proof of superiority.
That may be one of the most dangerous mistakes we make when we look at history: confusing what happened with what had to happen.
The photograph accompanying this essay is one I made at Wupatki.
People have lived in this region for more than 13,000 years. By the early 1100s, around 2,000 people lived within 50 miles of Wupatki Pueblo, communicating, cooperating and trading across great distances.
The National Park Service calls Wupatki a cultural crossroads. Thirteen federally recognized tribes remain traditionally associated with these lands today.
I want to be careful about what these stones can and cannot tell us.
I can’t look at a wall built centuries ago and tell you exactly how the people who built it understood authority, family or one another. I don’t want to turn Indigenous history into a convenient metaphor for my own ideas.
But I can look at it and remember something.
People were here.
They built, traded, raised children, solved problems and created communities. They weren’t earlier versions of us waiting for history to arrive at the society we have now. They were human beings living within worlds of their own. Their descendants and traditions are still very much alive.
And maybe that’s what I keep coming back to.
When we call hierarchy, domination, competition or patriarchy simply “human nature,” we’re mistaking one part of ourselves for the whole.
Human beings created those systems. But we also created systems built around cooperation, shared responsibility, communal resources, matrilineal families and leaders accountable to others.
We have understood wealth, responsibility, kinship and status in ways very different from the ones we inherited. None of those societies was perfect. Neither is ours. That isn’t the point. The point is that we have already been more than one thing.
And that makes it much harder to argue that the world we inherited was the only world human beings could have built. Yesterday I asked what else we could become. Today I find myself asking what else we have already been.
Maybe we need both questions.
Because if human beings have organized ourselves differently before, then imagining something different now isn’t necessarily fantasy. It’s remembering the size of our own possibility.
Tera said something else yesterday that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:
“That world already exists within us.”
I think she’s right.
Not because some perfect civilization is buried somewhere inside human nature waiting to emerge. But because all of it is in us.
The instinct to compete. And the instinct to cooperate.
The capacity to dominate. And the capacity to share.
The desire to accumulate. And the desire to contribute.
We inherited thousands of years of choices made by people who came before us.
But inheritance is not destiny.
History tells us what happened.
It doesn’t tell us what has to happen.
And perhaps understanding what else we have been can help us imagine what else we still might become.
Sources: Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission, Navajo Nation / Jonathan Nez, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, National Park Service — Haudenosaunee Women, National Park Service — Women of the Pimería Alta, Bureau of Indian Affairs — Allotment, U.S. Department of the Interior — Federal Indian Boarding Schools, National Park Service — Wupatki, National Park Service — Wupatki Associated Tribes.
Patriarchal societies existed thousands of years before Christianity, and there’s no single historical explanation for why they developed because human history is far messier than that. And there is a single causal explanation underlying all that messiness.
To paraphrase Aristotle (384-322 BC), we are what we repeatedly do. Saying to each other in our words and actions that we are all created equal, then, is not an act, but a good habit. Conversely, saying to each other in our words and actions that we are not all created equal is not an act, but a bad habit.
Human culture evolves for better or for worse and whether we want it to or not. Evolution is not necessarily adaptive. It can also be maladaptive.
Human culture is a function of our genetically inherited nature and our acquired through experience nurture.
I agree with Tera. We don’t need to change our nature to create a future in which human culture’s evolution is adaptive. That world already exists within us. We do need to change nurture so that our nature and nurture are working in harmony rather than at cross purposes.
There’s no getting away from competition. However, cooperation precedes adaptive competition. We either cooperate in establishing how we will compete before we compete, or the only rule is “heads I win and tails you lose.”
Well considered and fascinating post Kelli. Thank you and Tera.