In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow identify three basic social freedoms – freedom to disobey, freedom to move away and freedom to create and transform social orders – found across cultures and centuries, which facilitated the ability of pre-modern peoples to leave behind – by transforming, destroying, or simply abandoning – social setups that have become inappropriate or otherwise unwanted.
In contrast to the modern (Western) concept of individual freedom, where to be free means to be self-sufficient and as such is inseparable from private property, for the indigenous societies of America, individual freedom was embedded within structures of care; it implied that people permitted each other to live without fear of falling through the cracks. Individualism of European societies is thus about getting advantage over others, while for the indigenous American societies it was about guaranteeing one another the means for an autonomous life.
Autonomy is not about self-sufficiency, shard⁄it’s about shard⁄interdependence.
References:
Graeber, David & Wengrow, David. 2020. The Dawn of Everything. Macmillan Publishers