Feudalism, American Style

The question here is whether or not any sort of feudalism could have emerged in North America among the various Native American tribes. For example, could a more powerful tribe-such as the Iroquois-have developed the concept as their territory expanded?
 
You'd first need to define feudalism.

However, if you're going by the usual construct, a dash of Ganshof, a bit of Marx, I think the answer is no. The basic principle that underlies this understanding of 'feudalism' is that people can be tied to the land they till. Most north American civilisations didn't grok that way. They tended to use broader food webs. Mesoamerica might do it (I'm not sure how 'feudal' the Mexican civilisations really were, but the impression that they were entirely centralistic god-emperorships seems to be exaggerated from what I've read).
 
I thought the Missippians had a sort of fuedalism. Centralized power, agricultural, strong social stratification. Not quite there, though. IMO, fuedalism in NA would stem from them, either directly or as inspiration.
 
It might be possible in the Mesoamerican area. City states had already existed there for hundreds, thousands of years. One or several wide-area empires, building upon the success of the Mexica or Tarascans, could establish something like European-feudalism.

To get to it though, you're going to need some steps first. In its most classic sense, feudalism refers to a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals, and fiefs. Many medieval historians have included a broader social aspect, adding the peasantry bonds of manorialism, sometimes referred to as a "feudal society."

Basically to get something that most people can agree on as 'feudalism' or feudal-like you're going to need a weak, decentralized authority (king), several lords, vassals and etc in a widely arranged network and hierarchy (nobles), warriors-for-hire, usually paid for in land grants and rights (knights), a large and suppressed peasantry that is tied to the land (which do not own or rent the land upon which they work), that constitutes at least 9/10ths of the population and does all the work, mostly agricultural (peasantry/serfs), and a over-arching uniting religion with its own caste of priests and etc that interacts both outside of and in-between the nobility, the king, the knights, and the serfs.
 
Feudalism as we understand also has a ton to do with security. What is the point of having a King+bureaucracy if they can't defend you? Thus power is devolved until you get to a level that is effective for defense. It also has to do of course with the economy. If you don't have a good basis for a monetary economy or your money is being drained off (both the case in early-middle-ages Europe) then you have to find something else to pay and one way to support warriors without having to pay them yourself, is with land.

It might be interesting to see what happens if you get horses early. For a whimsical PoD, let's say the Vikings introduce horses to NA in 1000 or whenever they arrived and the horse spreads as both a means of transportation and a farm animal. The plains dwellers will probably do what they did in OTL, transform into steppe-nomad types, but the effect on eastern tribes might be worth thinking about.

As a bonus you also get some animal diseases so you might mitigate or make the Columbian exchange a little more fair.
 
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