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### Neurobiological Substrate

The neurobiological substrate of indigenous economic behavior is inseparable from the relational cosmologies that frame it. Oxytocin systems supporting long-term reciprocal obligation are activated within kin and community networks that extend, in many indigenous frameworks, to non-human relations — the salmon, the bison, the maize — requiring behavioral orientations toward those species that parallel the care-and-reciprocity patterns of human kinship. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal stress response is modulated by the security provided by collective land tenure and communal resource guarantees: the existential anxiety of market precarity — will I eat if the market turns? — is structurally reduced in economies with robust gift and redistribution circuits. Traditional ecological knowledge — the detailed, multigenerational understanding of local ecosystems that underlies indigenous resource management — is encoded in neural networks shaped by embodied practice and ceremonial reinforcement, representing a form of collective distributed cognition that modern economics has no adequate category for.