In indigenous culture gender is not categorized. There’s no ideology of women being “inferior” and men being “superior”. Both genders have their own tasks and skills that they are trained from birth to do so. There’s an equal amount of division of tasks to do on the daily. They even accept those who put themselves under the category of “two-spirit”. They also do not have any restrictions in sexual relations before marriage unlike the Europeans. It’s safe to say that they had the society we dream to have today.
The case that makes us similar to them is the idea of equality. The difference is that Western culture took time to realize that women can do more than just cook, clean and take care of their children and yet were the ones who were “civilized” at that time. While the indigenous people were way ahead of them; establishing ground rules to divide the amount of tasks equally between each gender. They never left women out of the picture, women had a big role in decision making as much as the men did in their culture. Indigenous people’s ideology of equality between genders was way ahead of time. Now we wish and hope that, that day will come around.
I didn’t get struck by the way indigenous culture was formed and how they operated amongst themselves, since I have taken anthropology, which mentioned the “two-spirit” and talked a lot about other clans/tribes that are minorities.
We can learn from indigenous people about gender is that each gender has their own strengths and weaknesses. Both can help one another in order to succeed and progress, and for that to happen no one should be stepping on anyone’s toes and no one should be at the top to give orders. Yes they did have a chief, but he/she/ that family gained that status by vote or by helping everyone else. Yet they do not govern their tribe.
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