Sounds like you want a western approach to non-western culture.
Since North American NAs are largely oral traditions, I'd suggest biographies.
Systematic data-based analyses are not "western", they are the best way to obtain valid data from which any meaningful inferences can be drawn.
One could still use oral communications from first hand sources as the source of data in a systematic sociological analysis. It would just mean actually caring about how you sample those oral communications, and how many you sample, and being careful to attend to factors that impact the data's validity, such as whether the person is speaking of events they experienced first hand or retelling stories retold to them, which in all cultures produces highly inaccurate information about the events being told if there is no record of the original events created by the actual observers of it.
Biographies that consist of unrecorded tales filtered through countless oral retellings, then told by a descendant who never experienced it to a writer who transforms it into a written medium are of minimal use to understanding the reality of those cultures from 500 years ago. Even less useful than the written tales told about those cultures by the earliest settlers who could and did write down their observations at the time. The most valid use of biographies that relied on the retold stories of descendants of those cultures would be if a sociologist treated each such biography as the unreliable single data point it is, and used all the biographies they could find in combination with all other data, including written accounts by early settlers, and more directly observed information about similar early contact cultures that was collected more recently after the methodological standards of modern sociology were more established.
But even with this most rational and data-driven approach, its a garbage in - garbage out situation. Lots of unreliable accounts don't combine into a reliable one, and the nature and timing and speed with which North American native populations were decimated and their few descendants forced into very different circumstances means there are very few accounts of daily social life in pre-columbian tribes that are reliable.
Horatio Parker said:
I thought of the missionaries, as their accounts are the oldest.
Yeah, but their accounts include virtually no "data" in the form of actual detailed recordings of events that were recorded systematically regardless of whether the fit the missionaries conclusions they were trying to convince themselves or others of.
While one can read them with their bias in mind, that doesn't help to know what actual events took place on a routine basis, even while the missionaries were there, let alone before they arrives and forcibly changed the way of life.
J842P said:
Seriously? Indigenous Americans exist *today*.
Only in the same sense that pre-historic man still exists today, because we descended from them and we still exist.
But if you want to know about the daily social life of pre-historic man, how much good does it do to analyze the daily lives of their currently existing descendants, or to ask current humans what their ancestors were like?
Today's "Indigenous Americans" are such in terms of genetic lineage, but little else. Culturally, they are closer to being in the same category as descendants of European settlers and recent immigrants than to the the people and societies that the OP in interested in learning about.
