CHAPTER 1

REASON & JUSTICE

In the 1690s, Baron de Lahontan, a French officer stationed in New France, held a series of conversations with Kondiaronk, a philosopher and statesman of the native Wendat, or Hurons, as they were known by the French. [FN1]

They were diplomatic partners and translators in the peace negotiations between the French, the English and several Native nations.

Yet it was their philosophical conversations that left the most enduring mark on history.

My first thought was that they could use a mediator. But the longer I listen, the more their conversations seem like an opening to a world beyond themselves. They are creating a contact zone for pluriversal diplomacy, where adventurous thinkers seek to grasp what is otherwise incomprehensible.

Yes, we can say these were cosmopolitical events.

KONDIARONK : What gives your Great Captain the right to all the countries that you now inhabit? And by what right do you claim to possess them? They always belonged to the Algonquins!
Can you accuse my people of robbing another nation of their lands? You cannot.

LAHONTAN : Why do you want to keep all this land? This land, Kondiaronk, is vast beyond measure. Yet it remains untamed, untouched. The highest freedom we can possess is the freedom to move and settle anywhere we like.

History is not confined to the past. Timelines are multiple and sometimes they intersect. They fold into past and future. By making decisions, we choose one timeline, leaving aside other options. But these elements remain forever potentials.

We can activate past options by the choices we make now.

We can transform past realities by the decisions we make now.

KONDIARONK : Lahontan, your words carry the weight of a man who believes his ways are superior. But tell me, what is advancement if it strips us of harmony with each other and our Mother Earth? I’ve heard that in France poor innocent men are tortured to confess everything they are accused of and more. Even women are not exempt from this terrible cruelty.

LAHONTAN : You shouldn’t blame the whole world for the mistakes of a few. The judges make every effort to find out whether a statement is true or false, and if they discover false witnesses, they get sentenced to death without fail.

KONDIARONK : Long live the Wendat, who live without laws, prison, or torture, in a state of tranquillity, enjoying a happiness completely foreign to the French. We live with the laws of instinct has imprinted on us from birth. We do not bicker, while you often quarrel over petty matters. In the absence of good arguments, the only way for you to assert your authority is through brute force and war.

In 1703, after his return from New France, the Baron wrote down the dialogues and published them in Amsterdam. [FN2]

The book was translated into several European languages and quickly became an international bestseller.

Every educated person in Europe had read the fascinating accounts of the eloquent and witty Indigenous delegate who had the audacity to critique European society, which considered itself to be a more advanced social, political and legal order. The publication grew out of Lahontan’s experience with cultural alterity and gave insight into a foreign culture in which governance relies on achieving consensus through persuasion and good arguments rather than willpower and submission, and in which women have control over their own bodies.

The Baron tried to write in his journal but stopped because he hated writing as himself, without interlocutor.

He understood that the way of entering a future existence is to write down these exchanges.

Only in writing could they coexist beyond a human lifetime and endure through the ages.

Without realizing it, his writings carried knowledge of the future. As if there were a code woven into his words.

Lahontan’s New Voyages to North America is a compilation of observations he made during several journeys to North America, as well as to Denmark and Portugal. Much of the work consists of conventional ethnographic descriptions of the customs, housing, physical appearance, languages, and temperament of the “Savages of North America,” as he calls them. Deeply fascinated by what he perceived as their philosophical outlook, Lahontan devoted a substantial section of the book to exploring their wisdom and cosmology. He presents this material in the form of a dialogue between himself and a “noted man”—that is, a “noble savage.” The figure of the “noble savage” was a literary and anthropological trope widely circulated in Enlightenment thought, depicting Indigenous peoples as inherently virtuous, innocent, and uncorrupted by civilization. [FN3] Today, this concept is recognized as a romanticized and reductive stereotype that obscures the complexity of Indigenous societies.

References

  1. [FN1] On the Hurons in the seventeenth century, see Conrad Heidenreich, Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians, 1600-1650 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1971).
  2. [FN2] To access the source text free of charge, visit the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/newvoyagestonort03laho (opens in a new tab).
  3. [FN3] For the most famous example of this depiction, which offers all the tropes discussed by Graeber and Wengrow, see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality [1754], trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1984).