Across many First Nations' cultures, the idea of building consensus was a natural and harmonious way of living. There were no rigid hierarchies in these societies, just people who did some jobs better than others. Everyone could cycle through leadership positions within a community. One person might have learned the language of another tribe the best, so s/he would be volunteered to talk to a visiting delegation. Another person might have better skill at finding and using medicines, so s/he would be the healer. Another person might be really good at calling in animals to eat for dinner, so s/he would lead hunts and train new hunters. Maybe someone did excellent basketry and knew all sorts of different kinds of ways to make baskets. S/he would be in charge of teaching new weavers. Maybe someone was fairly good at everything, then they would help out wherever they were needed. Elders held the stories and the genealogies and the histories and the traditions -- they may not be as fleet of foot, but they kept traditions alive so that the next generations could learn.
When a community needed to make a decision, they did not work on the "top-down" model. They worked cooperatively to build agreement within the community about how to address a situation. Elders were essential to building consensus because of their status as knowledge holders. Elder women, in particular, were respected for their wisdom as they both guided life into being and helped life pass on to the next world. They tended to hold more genealogy and history mainly because there may be very few men who made it to elderhood or (*disclaimer: I am offering humorous speculation here*) maybe because elder men tended to remain somewhat childlike even in advanced age.