Native Americans Influenced White Invaders
I'm reading a book, The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, 2023. It is a big book with small print so it's slow going. The authors are (were, one died young) an anthropologist and archeologist. Their perspective is so refreshing I'm having trouble doing anything but reading this book.
The book is about a topic others may know all about but new to me. Mostly, it is about voluminous records and essays written by French Jesuits on the North American continent in the 1600's. Recall for reference that the War of Independence and the Constitution came along much later, in the mid 1700's. I'm not conversant on the timing and location of French settlements but they included Eastern Canada, the Great Lakes region, Florida and the Mississippi River to the Gulf. Much of the French/Native relations were peaceful and included intermarriages. The French settlements began in the mid 1500's and went on to the mid 1700's.
The book took note of pages and pages of entries by the French Jesuits who were, of course, sent to convert the locals to Christianity. What they ran into were people very skilled at running their own societies and with well-developed views and arguments about the nature and what we can call the nature of human beings. Native societies were skilled in debate, having spent generations listening to augments of others and presenting their own.
Reports sent back to France by the French Jesuits were full of frustration because those already living in "New France" just laughed at the revelations of the Bible and the alleged invisible sky god. "What kind of ridiculous god you have," they said. "He is not in the animals and seeds we eat."
Further, they were contemptuous about the way white society operated. They went to meetings of the Jesuits and laughed at the way the meetings were conducted. Instead of listening quietly and respectfully until a speaker were finished, people interrupted each other. They also laughed at the authorities over the Jesuit priests and how worried lower ranking priest were of their superiors. "Our Chief cannot tell us what to do," they said. "We are free people to do what we want to. You are not free." Those original Americans did not believe in much discipline of children. Sexual promiscuity among the young was not frowned upon. Women could divorce.
The period of French settlement went on for some 200 years and, of course, involved local people learning and debating in French as well as French learning native languages. This long period was not one of only native people learning the ways of the French but also of the French learning from the locals. The thrust of this book, and many others which have covered this, is to recognize the considerable, but not adequately acknowledged, influence of these original Americans on the government and nation it became.
Re: "The Dawn of Everything"
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, that book lacks credibility and depth.
In fact "The Dawn of Everything" is a biased disingenuous account of human history (https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity & https://offshootjournal.org/untenable-history/) that spreads fake hope (the authors of "The Dawn" claim human history has not "progressed" in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system... so there's hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book's dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavour geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history since the dawn of agriculture has "progressed" in a linear stage (the "stuck" problem, see below), although not before that (https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This "progress" has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.CovidTruthBeKnown.com or https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html) which the fake hope-giving authors of "The Dawn" entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding and acknowledging the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we've been "stuck" in a destructive hierarchy and unequal 2-class system , and will be far into the foreseeable future (the "stuck" question --- "the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?" or "how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles" --- [cited from their book] is the major question in "The Dawn" its authors never really answer, predictably).
Worse than that, the Dawn authors actually promote, push, propagandize, and rationalize in that book the unjust immoral exploitive criminal 2-class system that's been predominant for millennia [https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/was-david-graeber-offered-a-deal]!
"All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance." —Guy Debord
A good example that one of the "expert" authors, Graeber, has no real idea on what world we've been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn't know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they've been wanting that for thousands of years (and that's not the only ignorant notion in the title) --- see https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
"The Dawn" is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked "science," served lucratively to the gullible ignorant public who craves myths and fairy tales.
"The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” ... just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm." --- Unknown
I don't know the source of this review. To insist there has been linear progress in human kind shows the author is unaware of the broad arguments in the social science and humanities that has been going on for many decades. The criticism that generalizations are made on limited observations and that observations to the contrary were not covered is valid and is made of most every study ever done in history or anthropology. Today I had the same thought when the book discussed the benefits of equal sharing of resources that was practiced in the native world but the authors did not discuss the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common problem that results. The book has its critics but is regarded as a ground breaking and helpful reframing of the conventional wisdom we have all accepted as accurate history of humans. A good summary of the criticism is found in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything#:~:text=The%20Dawn%20of%20Everything:%20A%20New%20History%20of
ReplyDelete