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 crushingly important is because it was super popular in Europe where plenty of people there reacted positively to these new societies that seemed in almost every way better. European elites including Rousseau dealt with this by inventing racism, and the Noble Savage myth: indigenous societies seemed so much better than European societies because they were backward and undeveloped. Rather than seen as equals as before, Native nations were obviously incapable of understanding kingship and god and “advanced” society.
This isn’t revisionist hyperbole. Rousseau and Hobbes and a whole slew of Enlightenment writers told us explicitly in their writings that they were responding to ideas from the Americas. Centuries of (white) scholarship ignored all those indications because the program was too successful: could “savages” (noble or not) really contribute to the greatest European intellectual achievements?
There are many devastating results of the erasure of Indigenous history and culture.
Graeber and Wengrow on Kandiaronk, a major Wendat statesman, and the part he played in the Indigenous critique of European society that we are starting to understand underpinned the European Enlightenment:
By 1721, Parisian theatregoers were flocking to Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’. The play was revived almost yearly for the next two decades.
“Kandiaronk: You honestly think you’re going to sway me by appealing to the needs of nobles, merchants and priests? If you abandoned conceptions of mine and thine, yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve; a levelling equality would then take its place among you as it now does among the Wendat. And yes, for the first thirty years after the banishing of self-interest, no doubt you would indeed see a certain desolation as those who are only qualified to eat, drink, sleep and take pleasure would languish and die. But their progeny would be fit for our way of living. Over and over I have set forth the qualities that we Wendat believe ought to define humanity—wisdom, reason, equity, etc.—and demonstrated that the existence of separate material interests knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason.”
(Chapter 2 of Graeber and Wengrow, quoting Barbara Alice Mann's chapter, ‘Are you delusional? Kandiaronk on Christianity’ in the absolutely delightful collection of translations, Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands: Selected Speeches and Critical Analysis.)
(The above was posted to social media on 2022 December 15.)