The Origins of Enlightenment

In their momentous book — _The Dawn of Everything_ (it’s got the entire field of history all a-tizzy right now) authors David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that the Enlightenment ideas of freedom, equality, and tolerance didn’t arise out of the minds of European political philosophers as much as from Native North American Indian intellectuals. This is a radical supposition — Enlightenment ideas, after all, are what modern democracies are modeled after.

As a key example, they take the ideas attributed to the Huron/Wendat Amerindian named Kondiaronk (d. 1701), a diplomat consistently praised by Europeans like one Father Pierre François Xavier de Charlevois, who wrote that “it was the general opinion that no other Indian had ever possessed greater merit, a finer mind, more valor, prudence, or discernment in understanding”.

A Frenchman named Lahotan recorded speeches of Kondiaronk, in which “Le rat”, as Kondiaronk was sometimes called, critiqued many elements of 17th-century European society. He condemned money as a root of all evil because it caused vast social inequality. He abhored the way Europeans kowtow to kings and nobles, and the fact that Europeans allowed poor members of society to suffer from starvation and poverty. Furthermore, he criticized Christianity, finding its precepts absurd but even more the fact that Christians waged religious wars against one another.

In Kandiaronk’s words, as Lahotan reports, “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 (ie, pursuit of money/wealth) knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason”.

Kandiaronk’s skill in diplomacy helped broker the Great Peace of Montreal among various Amerindian groups and the French in 1701, and you can see his signature written as a pictograph in the lower left-hand corner of the treaty, looking a bit like a nematode.