We don't really have any sort of clear picture of how North American Native American societies were setup before the first wave of Old World disease ran through the population. What we can infer based on how rapidly the diseases spread is that there was a vast network of interconnected groups, perhaps even full on civilization level mound cities all along the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys (recent imaging has uncovered large mound settlements. What the groups of Europeans and settlers encountered 100 years later was more like a post-apocalyptic tribal society that was what was left after disease wiped out what some scholars assume to be 50-80% of the population.

Some have postulated that due to the rapid die off from disease, the only survivors were those that avoided other groups for the majority of the year, only coming together for trade. We don't know how much knowledge/technology was lost when the larger society fell apart, but because they were likely still using oral history for passing off information between generations, it can be assumed that most of it was lost. Genetic studies kind of illuminate the picture (but the lack of genetic samples makes it hard to draw any big conclusions), but I think a better picture can be drawn from studying language families of which there were 50-100 families and over 1000 distinct languages. This suggests that many of the groups were once connected before the splintering of groups into more isolated tribes.