WE WERE NOT THE SAVAGES. (WHY THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION IS SO PROFOUND)

How anarchist ideas sparked the Enlightenment, caused the French Revolution, overthrew feudalism, and created the modern world.

Hey Gang,

Alright. Enough fucking around. I’m doing it.

For ages now, I’ve been talking about doing a deep dive into The Dawn of Everything, and now I’m getting down to business.

I’ll be honest, though. I’m daunted by the task at hand.

Why? Well, for one thing, The Dawn of Everything is a sprawling tome which covers a lot of ground. To be honest, it’s VERY all over the place. Furthermore, it lacks an actual thesis statement that would allow me to critique the work as a whole.

With all due respect to the authors, The Dawn of Everything is pretty much a scrapbook. It is not one single argument made in favour of a particular political position, but rather a collection of a TON of almost completely unrelated information about a vast array of different human societies over the course of tens of thousands of years.

It was meant to pick up where Graeber’s 2004 Fragments of an Anarchist Anthroplogy left off. Since it does not really advance a thesis or present a coherent body of theory, I consider The Dawn of Everything to be aspirational.

Graeber and Wengrow have done us a huge favour by compiling all this data, which could serve as the basis for a new narrative about the history of humanity, but the book fails to actually tie it together enough to be intelligible to a general audience.

To interpret that data, however, we’ll have to put our thinking caps on, because the theory the authors offer leaves a lot to be desired.

I will have a lot of harsh criticism for Graeber and Wengrow in coming posts, but I’d like to begin by focusing on the positive.

WHERE THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING SUCCEEDS

There really is no doubt that The Dawn of Everything is an epochal work.

It basically completely revolutionizes the history of the Western intellectual tradition, including the Enlightenment, natural law theory, and much, much more. I’m not exaggerating.

It really is a very significant contribution to the project of un-whitewashing history.

The major achievement of Graeber and Wengrow is to restore what they call The Indigenous Critique (of Western Civilization) to its proper place in history.

WHAT IS THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE?

Prior to reading The Dawn of Everything, I was not aware of the term the indigenous critique, and I definitely hope that it enters the vernacular.

If you’re in a position to do so, please do me a favour and help popularize this idea.

What is the indigenous critique, you ask? Well, basically, when Europeans arrived to Turtle Island, they encountered very different societies than those they were accustomed to. Those societies had very different cultures, each with their own intellectual tradition.

The collision of two completely separate intellectual traditions led to the creation of an indigenous critique of European society, which Graeber and Wengrow call THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE.

Please sear this term into your brain. It is part of the system upgrade that the world needs so badly right now.

The Indigenous Critique refers to critiques of European society which were developed by Turtle Islanders.

Elizabeth Whitworth explains:

In the late 1600s, European colonists in North America became engaged in philosophical discussions with the indigenous peoples of that land. Some of the indigenous people and the colonists learned to speak one another’s languages fluently. Graeber and Wengrow explain that the native North Americans had strong philosophical traditions and skilled orators who challenged European colonial officials in debates.

This is really wonderful, because for all the talk of decolonizing academia, the standard narrative is still of a vastly technologically superior civilization overrunning much more primitive societies in the New World.

In some cases, indigenous intellectuals travelled to Europe in order to study and understand feudal society. One such person was a Huron-Wendat leader named Kondiaronk, also known as Le Rat, who seems to have impressed everyone he ever met with his great brilliance.

Whitworth continues:

In New France, Wendat leader Kandiaronk raised scathing critiques of European social customs and values, particularly criticizing monarchical rule, social hierarchies, emphasis on the accumulation of wealth and materialism, and punitive justice systems. These descriptions then made their way back to Europe, where they were widely distributed among the intellectual class and, Graeber and Wengrow argue, became the inspiration for much Enlightenment thought.

In other words, one of the most important thinkers in the history of the Western intellectual tradition was an indigenous anarchist from what’s now Canada.

Don’t believe me? Get ready to have your mind blown.

One of the major cultural differences the Europeans and indigenous people found they had was the notion of equality and its connection to freedom. Indigenous ideas about equality and freedom directly conflicted with the European notions of social status and a natural hierarchy.

Graeber and Wengrow say that Europe before the 1700s lacked a notion of social equality. They believed that some people are naturally higher or lower in status and authority than others. They lived in monarchies and they derived that system from biblical notions of nobility and authority. In other words, God decided one’s station in life. 

By contrast, many of the Native American cultures had no notion that anyone could be born higher or lower in status than anyone else or that anyone could have authority over anyone else. In such cultures, status might be gained with age or according to merit. But the notion that people are inherently unequal or that any status could give someone the right to dominate someone else would not have existed in this kind of cultural worldview.

Now, I don’t expect you to believe me about all of this right away. After all, this is mind-boggling stuff.

It all checks out, though. There really is no doubt that the indigenous critique had a massive influence on thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Proudhon, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and so on.

It’s pretty frigging crazy that they’ve managed to sweep this all under the rug so long!

Don’t take my word for it, though. I encourage you watch this video to bring yourself up to speed:

To a very significant degree, anarchism comes from the indigenous critique, and arguably so do socialism, liberalism, communism, and feminism.

The ideas brought forward by the indigenous critique led to the French revolution, which is where all the aforementioned ideologies are usually imagined to have originated.

In reality, it turns out that those ideas can be traced back further, to indigenous anarchists who just so happen to be from the exact area where I grew up. Pretty fucking cool, if you ask me.

Anyway, the re-introduction of the indigenous critique back into political discourse is Graeber and Wengrow’s most significant achievement in The Dawn of Everything. And what an achievement!

If this history becomes common knowledge, it means that the euro-supremacist Story of the World has been overthrown!

By proving that Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire were heavily influenced by the intellectual tradition of Turtle Island, The Dawn of Everything basically debunks the notion that Europeans were more intellectually advanced than Turtle Islanders were.

Think about that. Remember, it’s because of the Enlightenment, which was a major paradigm shift that we became modern people. It’s because of the Enlightenment that we reject the institution of slavery, for instance. The idea that human beings have certain inalienable rights didn’t exist before the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment changed everything, and it turns out that we have indigenous intellectuals such as Kondiaronk to thank for many things that we take for granted today.

If not for the indigenous critique, we’d be living in a whole different world.

It’s also a very big deal to learn that anarchist ideas directly inspired the French revolution, the ideas of which have influenced every revolution which has come since.

THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE IS AN ANARCHIST CRITIQUE

In a book written by Kondiaronk’s friend, a fictionalized version of the Wendat chief offers this distillation of the indigenous critique.

I’ve spent six years thinking about the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single one of your ways that isn’t inhumane, and I sincerely believe that it can only be because you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’.

I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evil; the scourge of souls and the slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine that one can live in the land of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining that one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigue, deceit, lies, betrayal, insincerity, all the worst behaviors in the world. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all for money. In light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right to refuse to touch or even look at money?

Clearly, Kondiaronk was a very hardcore anarchist. Specifically, he was an anarcho-communist. The indigenous critique of Western Civilization is a fundamentally anarchist critique.

That means that the Enlightenment was inspired by anarchist ideas, which in turn means that anarchists have had a much greater impact on the world than I was previously aware.

One reviewer, writing in the Atlantic, explains:

The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom.

The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition).

They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West.

In other words:

We all know that history is written by the victors, and this is doubly true when the defeated don’t write.

The history of the Conquest of the Americas is often portrayed as a more technologically advanced (and therefore superior) civilization running over much weaker, more primitive people.

It is true that Europeans were far more advanced in techniques of warfare, because life in Europe had been characterized by endemic warcraft for as long as anyone could remember.

But is superiority in warcraft the same thing as cultural superiority? I don’t think so.

In 1753, Benjamin Franklin wrote that when colonists were able to choose between settler society and an indigenous society, they invariably chose the latter.

The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appears strongly in the little success that has hitherto attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians, in their present way of living, almost all their Wants are supplied by the spontaneous Productions of Nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when Game is so plenty, they visit us frequently, and see the advantages that Arts, Sciences, and compact Society procure us, they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never shewn any Inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts; When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger Brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.

In other words, people who were free to choose between indigenous societies and settler societies invariably found the former more to their liking. Is this not proof that the indigenous people of Turtle Island were more culturally advanced than Europeans were at the time of contact?

Pere Lejeune, a missionary who lived amongst the Montagnais Naskapi people in what’s now Quebec, wrote of them that:

They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages…

Our Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests, I mean ambition and avarice.  They have neither political organization, nor offices, nor dignities, nor any authority, for they only obey their Chief through good will toward him… Also, as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.

In other words, the people of Turtle Island were free.

DID THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE LEAD TO NATURAL LAW THEORY?

If you are an anarchist, communist, socialist, or classical liberal, you can now trace your ideology back to before the French Revolution.

It also turns out that anarchism isn’t a European invention. Proudhon may have coined the term, but the ideas seem to come primarily from the indigenous critique, although European peasant movements also maintained their own folk anarchist tradition, which was usually connected to heretical spiritual movements.

Basically, at a certain point in European history, people started questioning fundamental assumptions about the structure of feudal society.

This seems to have really caught on in the early 1700s. Why?

Well, because people now had concrete proof that ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE. Many Europeans were deeply impressed by the indigenous societies that they encountered in the Americas, and began to conceive of political possibilities that would have previously been unimaginable.

Personally, I suspect that the indigenous critique led directly to the creation of natural law theory, which we can regard as a synthesis of old and new world ideologies.

As we shall see going forward, however, the indigenous critique went far beyond the precepts of classical liberalism.

Indeed, one of the areas in which The Dawn of Everything succeeds is in presenting the idea that the concept of equality is, from the beginning, sort of a half-assed notion.

What is most important is not that human beings must be equal (whatever that means), but that freedom is our birthright.

Freedom and equality tend to go together, because it is the structure of class society which produces vast disparities of wealth in the first place.

Freedom without equality is certainly imaginable, but what is equality without freedom?

That sounds like some Marxist bullshit to me!

IS ANARCHISM DIRECTLY DESCENDED FROM THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE?

So, to conclude, the intellectual tradition that we call anarchism began when French thinkers rejected the legitimacy of the hierarchy inherent to feudal society.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is credited with coining the term anarchism, but he likely got the idea from indigenous intellectuals such as Kondiaronk.

These ideas led to a revolutionary movement which succeeded in overthrowing the French monarchy and creating the modern world.

In other words, anarchist ideas overthrew feudalism. Pretty crazy, eh?

To be fair, the indigenous critique has not yet succeeded in bringing down Western Civilization, but perhaps it’s just a matter of time.

For some reason, it feels appropriate to end with an excerpt from an article I wrote last year called The End of Their World is the Beginning of Ours!, which is kind of like an anarchist confession of faith.

My allegiance to not to the country where I was born, nor to the religion that I was raised in. My loyalty is the Supreme Being that we are all apart of, to the planetary super-organism we call Mother Earth, and to the cosmic super-organism of the universe, the vast swirling expanse that will forever remain mysterious.

There exists not the faintest shadow of a doubt in my mind that the force to which I belong will triumph over the forces of ignorance, selfishness, and greed. The flowering of the life-force of the universe into myriad new manifestations of heretofore unimaginable splendour will proceed apace, as it has since time began. The nature of the universe is a creative chaos. It is this chaos that created us, and all sense of separation from it is pure illusion. We are that force, and that force will continue to flourish forever.

Understand this, and you understand that there really is nothing to fear. You are immortal, and all-powerful, and free, and nothing can take that away from you. You are not your body, nor your mind, nor your identity. You are the creative life-force of the universe itself.

That is the meaning of the Vedic axiom: THOU ART THAT.

Realize this, and you are once set free.

-Crow Qu’appelle