Wicked Freedom
One of the interesting ideas explored early on in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is the high degree of freedom in some American societies of New France the seventeenth century relative to Western Europe and their disdain for Europeans.
Sharing a few excerpts from chapter 2, based on conversations between Jesuit priests and the local population, that highlight this.
They consider themselves better than the French: "For," they say, "you are always fighting and quarreling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbors."
They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggars in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.
"I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever - so much so that Fathers have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are not in danger."
Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted that the culprit's entire lineage or clan pay compensation. They made it everyone's responsibility to keep their kindred under control. 'It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,' Lallemant explains but rather 'the public that must make amends for the offences of the individual.'More remarkable still, he concedes: 'this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France.'