No one but you has been trying to view indigenous cultures through the lens of patriarchy. It's legacy exists almost entirely in cultures that became highly structured and what we would think of as "developed."
But let's take the problematic term out of the equation for a while and look at the sociological and political dynamics of human history without the emotional hook of that word. Then perhaps you can wrap your brain around this.
There is little question that prior to about 6k years ago human beings lived in small forager groups of about 20-50 people. These groups were primarily made up of extended kin, with the addition of a few who had come from neighboring tribes to mate. We have significant evidence that these groups did this sort of exchange in order to prevent inbreeding, but also to maintain bonds of goodwill with their neighbors -something that is also a fundamental part of forager cultures even today. They are highly interdendent on each other for survival and maintaining social connections is a primary survival strategy. I won't expand on that here since an entire book could be written about that.
There is some evidence that these groups were matrilineal, in part because without keeping tight control of women, which is hard to do in a nomadic, foraging culture, there was no way to know for sure who the father of a child is. A central element of forager bands even today is food sharing and cooperative, leaderless groupings. We can extrapolate that our ancestors lived in this same way also, not just because modern foragers do, but because of a preponderance of archaeological, anthropological and genomic data that indicates it. The nuclear family doesn't really exist yet, because it is not needed. Just as is the case in many egalitarian cultures today, parentage isn't all that important. The welfare of the group is what matters as a survival strategy.
“Destabilization of the social resource network decreases group stability and efficiency and lowers the average fitness benefit derived from cooperation. When group stability is important for individual advantage, selection will favor active peacemaking and cooperation in our closest relatives and ourselves.” (p. 401 War, Peace and Human Nature by Douglas Fry)
If there are almost no personal possessions and everyone shares food, and women are primary producers of food, who cares who the father is?
Around the time that we start living in one place, rather than roaming, and we start planting things in land that we want to pass along to verified heirs, the social and political ways that we organize ourselves in communities begins to shift. Not only are there food stores which need to be monitored and doled out, but the population begins to expand dramatically. Agriculture has a lot of downsides as far as providing a balanced diet, but it does tend to regularly produce more than hunting and gathering.
In addition, women who used to spend all day out walking around gathering the vast majority of what the tribe was going to eat (hunting is a small although important portion of calories for most foragers) are now relegated to the inside of the house. This happened in cultures where plowed agriculture arose. Those with rice fields or hoed agriculture have a slightly different trajectory, but it's hard for women to work a plow and mind children, so they end up indoors, where they can be kept an eye on. Women begin having babies every 1-2 years rather than every 3-4 years as was typical for foragers. The nuclear family becomes the central unit of social organization and the fortunes of that family rather than the wellbeing of the entire group becomes the focus. For the first time in human history we begin to see some people who have more status, wealth, and power than others.
As I said in my OP, it's widely accepted amongst anthropologists that social systems that prevent any one person from having power over others in the forager band was a central adaptation of human evolution - one that allowed us to survive in a harsh environment when some of our other hominid cousins did not.
So, around 6-9 thousand years ago, humans shifted from small kin-oriented communal foraging groups to ones that were sedentary and were organized around nuclear families where knowing who the father of a child is was important for the first time since now there were personal possessions and land to pass on - something that had never existed before. These groups had wealth disparity and used dominance hierarchies to determine status, class, and power - a dramatic shift in human social dynamics.
As perhaps you can now more clearly see, this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with modern society in any way shape or form, whether in the West or in native cultures. It is simply a recounting of what took place in a particular time in history. I've already linked and quoted to you something like 20 articles that confirm and support this - from science journals, mainstream publications like The Guardian, and from my own research driven stories, which quote from experts in the field. This is what just about universally all anthropologists believe happened. There is some minor quibbling about just how egalitarian Paleolithic peoples actually were, but other than that everyone agrees that around the rise of agriculture, the social and political systems changed dramatically in the ways that I have already described above. That's all I'm talking about.
There is no ideology in play, there is no agenda. This is simply the conclusions that have been drawn by subject matter experts from the archaeological, anthropological and genomic data that we have gathered over several decades. If you cannot accept this as factual, then we need to just stop right here because it can't be refuted. This is simply the way it took place. Is that really so hard to accept and if so why?
