Missionaries, explorers, traders, European settlers learned indigenous languages ​​in long conversations with native speakers. This intellectual exchange between different universes gave rise to chronicles that caused a stir on the Old Continent in the 17th and 18th centuries. Each new chronicle brought fantastic ideas and descriptions of lifestyles as exotic as they were desirable for Europe, which was still in the shadow of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, and the plague. Today’s dictatorships and yesterday’s monarchies differ only in the Church’s justifications, which called the absolute and despotic power of the king “divine”. With what amazement Europeans would read that best seller: “Jesuit Relations”, accounts of the Hurons (Wendat), Iroquois, Algonquins and other peoples, published between 1632 and 1673. Missionary Le Jeune writes about the Montagnais: “They believe that they have an innate right to be free, wild ponies, and give nothing to anyone tribute, except when they want it. Hundreds of times they reproached me for the fear that our captains have before, and they laugh at their own. All the authority of his chiefs is on the tip of his tongue, for he alone is eloquent and powerful, but even if he kills himself by speaking and haranguing, they will not submit to him unless they like him.” And Father Lallemant admits that there are no men on earth who freer than the Wendats, or so incapable of submitting to any power. And he complains, in European fashion, that “fathers have no control over their children, nor captains over their subjects, nor are they bound by the laws of any country unless they choose to obey them. They they don’t punish the guilty.” Instead of punishing them cruelly and putting them in prison as they did in France at the time, the Wendats insisted that the criminal clan compensate the community for the damage caused. In this way, the victims were compensated, and the groups tried to maintain ethics among themselves, because the responsibility for individual actions was collective. Many chroniclers also noted (considering it reprehensible) that natives did not beat their children and that women had autonomy over their bodies.

(…) Enlightenment is the light emitted by the free spirit of America, and we owe it to Kondiaronko and Rousseau.

unstoppable

“It was quite interesting that people came to ask if we were studying or if the house was owned or rented,” says Jorge, who at the age of 87 remembers the first census that was conducted in 1950.

When these ideas reached Europe thanks to the chroniclers, French intellectuals began to ask themselves: why are we not equal, why are we not free, why do we obey kings and dogmas? Intoxicated by these ideals, European authors imagined dialogues with American natives thanks to which they could express “radical” ideas (from a European point of view), such as the successful feminist manifesto, the epistolary novel of the French Madame de Graffigny: Letters of a Peruvianuntil (1747).

Therefore, the Enlightenment is the light emitted by the free spirit (not perfect or generalized) of America, and we owe it to both Condiaronko and Rousseau. This and other amazing things can be read in Dawn of everything. A new history of mankind (The dawning of everything. A new history of mankind) (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021), a book that will revolutionize the way we perceive our past and, hopefully, our present. (OR)