CHAPTER 3

EQUALITY

KONDIARONK : I want you to meet my daughter, Onienta. We are preparing her wedding. She is about to marry a young man against my will.

ONIENTA : A man who is a good warrior.

KONDIARONK : But a miserable hunter. She chose him and that’s enough. I comply with her wish. But I understand it is not so in France, where parents must consent to the marriage of their children, right?

LAHONTAN : Where would that take us if our children decided for themselves?

ONIENTA : I wouldn’t let my father marry me to someone of his choosing. Am I not allowed to enjoy my freedom?

KONDIARONK : Women are the heartbeat of our people, Lahontan. They are the keepers of our traditions, the bearers of life, and the stewards of our lands. Their wisdom guides us. Nobody would benefit from forcing a woman against her will.

LAHONTAN : In France, marriages are eternal.

KONDIARONK : You see. Inequality of wealth and birth is the source of all your romantic drama. Don’t you see the tyranny in that?

LAHONTAN : Your world seems upside down when it comes to the proper place of women. Young men and women have sex before marriage! And your women have abortions. It’s the most abominable cruelty. A crime which our Christian God will never pardon.

Of course, you will tell me she does it to save her reputation. Our women suffer just as much dishonour for this and are sometimes locked up for life. But yours can have as many men as they like after such a terrible sin.

Something amazing happens when philosophy is brought into close contact with human experience. It opens to questions that involve the whole person, the whole body, organs, senses and feelings, not just the intellect. If you want to understand a society, study their politics of sexuality and reproduction.

These radical ideas from the Wendat and other Native nations, sparked lively salon discussions and public debates across Europe.

Women, in particular, were eager to learn about the freedom of Native women and their self-determination over their bodies.

KONDIARONK : Yes, our women use potions and various methods of birth control. However, when you surrender to sexual desire the responsibility falls on both sexes. When a Frenchman boasts about their adventures in public, everyone blames the women and praises the man. It should be the other way around. She is the one that merits pardon, and he deserves to be punished.

ONIENTA : Exactly, how could you think otherwise.

LAHONTAN : This liberty you Wendat praise so much causes great social disorder. According to you, wives, who by nature should be subject to their husbands, are vested with equal authority. Such freedom results in perpetual debauchery, in which nature is granted unlimited satisfaction for all its desires.

The dialogue form suggests that Indigenous reasoning is coherent, that Indigenous critique carries real validity, and that European knowledge is not universal but situated—provincial rather than absolute. [FN1] This film project works within a space that Lahontan only partially opened. The next consequential step would be to move beyond a “critique of Europe” toward a “plurality of worlds,” where Indigenous cosmologies are treated as ontologically real rather than merely as critical instruments. Such a shift would not simply relativize Europe, but decenter it altogether. [FN2]

There is a powerful conceptual tension inherent in these dialogues: Lahontan needed to fictionalize Indigenous thought to make Europe hear it. Today, Indigenous thought risks being heard only when translated into scientific or philosophical language. [FN3]

References

  1. [FN1] On this concept, see the pathbreaking work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); on the need to decenter European narratives of the left, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition [1983], New Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley, New Preface by Damien Sojoyner and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Updated and Revised 3rd Edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
  2. [FN2] This argument is part of the broader shift from viewing nature as a kind of inert simplicity to an understanding of the intelligence of ecosystems. In Ursula Biemann’s previous work, Forest Mind, this shift is examined in detail. In the context of Dialogues with the Future, it is important to stress that while contemporary European theories of nature are attempting to move beyond the notion of simplicity, framing the forest itself as a model of intelligence: a network of complex semiotic systems encompassing plants, DNA, and cognition. Rather than celebrating “noble simplicity,” this perspective emphasizes distributed intelligence. See Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
  3. [FN3] This is a challenge that is elaborated in greater detail in Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind: On the Interconnection of All Life (Berlin: Spector Books, 2022).