Last night Heather Cox Richardson wrote, "The “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” event is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to use the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to rewrite America’s history, turning it from one that champions the Enlightenment values of natural rights, equality, and self-government to one that requires Americans to accept that some people are better than others and to defer to their leaders."
That's such a reminder of the deeper context for the successful struggles of the last 70 years now under attack--the Civil Rights Movement, women's movement, queer rights movement, Indigenous rights movements, disability rights movements, and underlying them all a kind of universal rights that has undermined a lot of the hierarchies that granted too much power to parents over children and husbands over wives including to use violence, of bosses over employees, police over people, etc. We have realized the ideals of the Enlightenment in ways that its official thinkers in the 18th century could not have imagined. They want to change it back. We must keep changing it forward.
I wrote in The Beginning Comes After the End In their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow argue that Native Americans had a huge influence on European thought. Earlier scholars had credited Native peoples with influencing ideas of democracy, the Constitution, and women’s rights within the US, but The Dawn of Everything proposed that Indigenous world-views crossed the Atlantic to Europe. That influence came in part through seventeenth-century Jesuit narratives of their interactions
with Huron, Mi’kmaq, Wendat, and other nations of what are now
eastern Canada and the northeastern US. Graeber and Wengrow
propose that the Enlightenment, conventionally seen as a European phenomenon, arose from the impact of European contact with societies that prized freedom, equality (including gender equality), human rights, inclusion, and peaceful conflict resolution far more than did Europeans of the time.
“In the considered opinion of the Montagnais-Naskapi,” they
write, “the French were little better than slaves, living in constant
terror of their superiors.” Graeber and Wengrow argue that this
Indigenous influence was far more significant than has previously
been estimated, proposing that “most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perhaps even unknowable Other. But in fact, in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty—or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology—indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth- century European ones.”
It’s a deft reversal of the convention in which Europeans spread
civilization and impact traveled from east to west, not the other way around. In other words, Indigenous worldviews and values were hugely influential then. I’d argue that they also are now, specifically in a vision of interconnection and nonseparation that a lot of settler colonialists have adopted, or aspired to, yearning for a society in which those values govern how we do things. Or don’t do them, when it comes to the destruction of nature, species, places, the climate, through greed, heedlessness, and indifference.
