Now, we haven't talked much about American Indians, mostly because they were geographically isolated and didn't have a written language, but let's at least give them a thought bubble. Before the arrival of the Europeans, most Native Americans lived in tribal groups, and they subsisted on a combination of small-scale agriculture and hunting and gathering, depending on where they were situated. There were too many tribes to generalize about specific social structures, but it's probably safe to say that in terms of gender, they were much more egalitarian than the Europeans who they met up with, which may explain why European women who were taken captive by Indians sometimes preferred to stay with the tribe rather than be rescued, although that's somewhat controversial. One thing we can say about the Indians, their notions of what it meant to hold property were very different from those of the Europeans. Individual Indians did not own land in the European sense. They used it, and not always particularly intensively. Europeans, when they came to North America, had a hard time even recognizing that the Indians were raising crops because their forms of farming were so different from European agriculture.