The Indigenous Critique is a term popularized by Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything and it will blow your mind if you, like me, were raised in a Eurocentric universe.
In a nutshell, through the 1600s and 1700s, trenchant critiques of European society by numerous Indigenous statesmen and orators in North America were carried back to Europe, where they caused a sensation. To many Indigenous nations, the European way of life—rapacious, uncharitable, servile—was incomprehensible and obviously inferior to those Indigenous societies where starving people were invariably fed and adopted into family networks, and where no leader could tell a free human what to do let alone some military captain or priest. We have multiple independent examples of this and an oration by Kandiaronk, a famous Wendat statesman, has come down to us, and it is utterly brilliant: Barbara Mann titled her chapter translation, “‘Are you delusional?’ Kandiaronk on Christianity“ (more below).
The reason this Indigenous Critique is c