The Eastern Woodlands have a lot more going on than just Cahokia. Cahokia is just the most famous of the Mississippian polities. At the time of European contact, the vast majority of polities practiced agriculture and had been doing so for thousands of years. Most hunted and gathered too, but the bulk of most people's calories in this region came from agricultural products. Starting 5000 years ago and really taking off around 3000 years ago, this would have been the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC), a suite of starchy and oily seed crops - including sunflowers and goosefoot (a close relative of quinoa). Around 2000 years ago, maize makes its first appearance in the Eastern Woodlands from Mesoamerica - probably indirectly through the Southwest, which had received maize from Mesoamerica considerably earlier. Maize remains a rarity in the Woodlands until around 1000 years ago. As maize becomes widely adopted throughout the area, it completely displaces many of the older EAC crops. Sunflowers and squashes make it through the transition relatively unscathed. Goosefoot got demoted to being a minor crop.

This shift caused significant dietary problems. Maize is great if you want to produce a lot of excess calories, which in turn is good for supporting large populations. However, other than raw calories, maize doesn't have much too off in terms of nutritional value. The EAC, on the other hand, had previously been great at providing a diverse selection of essential vitamins and minerals, but as far as mass producing calories was concerned, it doesn't appear to have been worth the time. EAC plants are incredibly easy to grow (today, most of them are treated as weeds because they take roots so readily), but they're challenging to harvest and process since most of them produce very tiny seeds. Ultimately, the EAC gives lets you support a relatively small but healthy population, while maize lets you support a large but nutritionally deficient population.

In human remains from around 1000 years ago, we see that a lot of people suffered from nutritional problems associated with a maize-heavy diet. This was eventually solved by adding another batch of Mesoamerican imports into the new agricultural system - beans - which supplied the nutrients that maize is lacking.

But the differences in what sort of plants early farmers had available is only part of the issue here. We also have to look into why people start domesticating plants to begin with, and that varies from place to place. The development of the EAC stands out among other inventions of agriculture because it's a low intensity system that doesn't appear to have ever shifted into primary mode of subsistence.

To add another layer of complexity to the question, the mere presence or absence of agriculture isn't the only issue here. Let's go back to the year 1700 BCE:

At this time, the first city in North America is getting its start. It's not in Mesoamerica - the Olmec are still a few centuries in the future. It's in northeast Louisiana. Today it's called Poverty Point. A great earthen pyramid dominates the "downtown" region of the site, second to Cahokia's Monks Mound in size. Immediately east of this pyramid is a set of concentric semi-circles almost a mile across. These rings once served as the foundations of numerous houses that surrounded the inner courtyard. Elsewhere at Poverty Point there are other examples of monumental architecture. The current estimates for Poverty Point's population is ~5000 - fairly small for a city, but it's still North America's earliest example of urbanization and new residential sections continue to be found as excavations continue. Poverty Point was the epicenter of a cultural and economic sphere of influence that included most of the lower Mississippi valley, with trade contacts all the way up the river into the Great Lakes. While the EAC was coming together to the north and east, Poverty Point itself seems to have been completely non-agricultural. Non-agricultural polities would continue to be major powers in region all the way up to Contact and beyond. Circa 1500, one of the biggest powers in the Southeast was the non-agricultural Calusa, who dominated southern Florida and remained independent of European influences (aside from a brief alliance with the Spanish) until the early 1700s, when they were defeated by an Anglo-Creek alliance. Unfortunately, because Europeans learned to leave the Calusa alone relatively quickly, we don't have a lot of ethnohistorical information about them, which has led to some wildly divergent population estimates. Tens of thousands at least. The certepe ("king") was said to be able to host a council of 2000 men within his home. When they weren't busy conquering Florida, they were building canals through the Everglades and across the islands around the coast to ease travel. After three centuries of neglect, these are all filled in with sediment now.

Turning our attention back to the past, the Pax Hopewelliana and its predecessors seems to put the the nascent urbanization that began at Poverty Point on hold. From about 200 BCE to 400 CE, we're in a golden age for the Woodlands. Arts, sciences, ceremonialism, monumental architecture and trade flourish; Evidence for violence diminishes to almost nothing. And this is going on from the Atlantic to the Rockies, though it is most strongly felt in the Ohio and Misssissippi valleys. Despite a lot of amazing things happening in this period, it seems to be going on without cities - or even towns and villages for the most part. Small homesteads and hamlets of one or two families seems to be the dominant settlement pattern.

Then, between 400 and 500 CE, the Pax Hopewelliana breaks down. People begin to cluster more tightly. In the Middle Mississippi valley in particularly, several large villages of springing up. By 600 CE, they get their hands on a variety of maize that can grow well in a temperate climate. Around 1050 CE, one of those large villages explodes in population - becoming the Cahokia you're familiar with, with a population perhaps as high as 40,000 at its peak. But it wasn't alone. Those other large villages in the area became places like East St Louis and Mound City (St. Louis proper), which were around half the size of Cahokia itself, and probably all part of the same polity.

Cahokia is the most famous, and probably the largest, Mississippian city, but it wasn't the only one. There are three Mississippian sites that are seen as being highly influential on all the others: Cahokia, Etowah (in Georgia), and Spiro (in Oklahoma). Moundville in Alabama is potential fourth epicenter, but it seems to have been more influenced by Cahokia the other two. Other large Mississippian sites springing up around this time include, Lake Jackson near Tallahassee, Bottle Creek near Mobile, Kincaid in Illinois, Angel Mound in Indiana, Cofitachequi in South Carolina, and Winterville in Mississippi. Each of these were the epicenters of large nations. By the time of European contact, some of these had shifted around a bit. The power of Etowah shifted to Coosa and the Apalachee of Lake Jackson abandoned their old capital for twin capitals of Anhaica (which may have surpassed Cahokia in size) and Ivitachuco (I discuss what Coosa and the Apalachee were like at the time of European contact in this post). Winterville's power got passed from one Plaquemine (lower Mississippi) site to another for a while (Quigualtam was in charge when Europeans first got to the area), until it eventually ended up in a much diminished state at the Grand Village of the Natchez. When Cahokia's power diminished, Angel Mound became the dominant Mississippian power in the north, but around 1450 there appears to be have been a quite revolution and the people of Angel Mound shifted to perhaps a more egalitarian confederacy-style government based around the mouth of the Wabash River; this is the Caborn-Welborn culture which is likely ancestral to one of the Ohio Siouan groups but we're not sure which exactly because the Haudenosaunee screwed everything up for future anthropologists and historians (and people living in the Great Lakes / Ohio Valley circa 1650-1700).

These are just some of the notable Mississippian polities. There was more going on than just Cahokia. If we go with the traditional anthropological definitions, very little of the Eastern Woodlands was "tribal" at the time of European contact. Especially in the south, it's mostly paramount chiefdoms, with confederacies dominating the north. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the band / tribe / chiefdom / state model, but that's perhaps a topic for another day.

North America is a big place filled with wildly different terrains, cultures, fauna, resources, etc. So I'll just cover the southern NW.

So let's take a group from the NW (let's say Coast Salish or Wakashan) and see what Mesoamerican type civilization is going to mean to them. Having huge buildings out of stone, a centralized government with thousands of people, and agriculture as being incredibly pointless when the constant rain combined with the mountainous and hilly terrain (along with dense evergreen forests) would make finding a good spot for building things like pyramids or temples incredibly difficult. The fishing runs, whaling, hunting, etc. is good enough to where farming wouldn't be necessary to sustain a village of over 150+. Villages spread out so they don't exhaust all the resources in the area and leaders were only followed if they were respected, meaning a centralized government wouldn't be able to really concentrate and be established anywhere. A tribe in the NW is composed of blood related villages that are mostly autonomous from one another.

Comparing people that have a mountainous, hilly area on the coast filled with temperate rainforest with people whose area ranged from tropical lowlands to mountainous highlands to grasslands isn't a valid way of asking "Why aren't they like them, they're similar".

If you'd like me to elaborate more on why the Southern NW wouldn't have had a civilization like Mesoamerican/Andean ones, I'd be willing to add on.

Sources:

People's of Cascadia

The Puyallup Nisqually

Indians of Puget Sound

There's always room for discussion, but perhaps the section Technology and Civilization in the Americas in our FAQ will answer your inquiry.

Just want to let you know that Olmecs, Zapotecs, Mayans, and Toltecs are North American, while the Inca are Andean. Mesoamericans are still North Americans, though.