The Dawn of Everything

the whole story we summarized in the last chapter – our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique

Sky People, Earth People and Water People

The smoke, they say, gives them intelligence, and enables them to see clearly through the most intricate matters.

migration is often framed as implying the restructuring of an entire social order, merging our three elementary freedoms into a single project of emancipation: to move away, to disobey and to build new social worlds

Most later indigenous societies had a separation between peace chiefs and war chiefs: an entirely different administration came into force in times of military conflict, then melted away as soon as matters were resolved.

Dream-guessing’ was often carried out by groups, and realizing the desires of the dreamer, either literally or symbolically, could involve mobilizing an entire community:

a concept the Wendat (Huron) called Ondinnonk, a secret desire of the soul manifested by a dream:
Hurons believe that our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed … They believe that our soul makes these natural desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but, on the contrary, if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry, and not only does not give its body the good and the happiness that it wished to procure for it, but often it also revolts against the body, causing various diseases, and even death.12

Portraying history as a story of material progress, that framework recast indigenous critics as innocent children of nature, whose views on freedom were a mere side effect of their uncultivated way of life and could not possibly offer a serious challenge to contemporary social thought (which came increasingly to mean just European thought).1

The process usually called ‘state formation’ can in fact mean a bewildering number of very different things. It can mean a game of honour or chance gone terribly wrong, or the incorrigible growth of a particular ritual for feeding the dead; it can mean industrial slaughter, the appropriation by men of female knowledge, or governance by a college of priestesses. But we’ve also learned that when studied and compared more closely, the range of possibilities is far from limitless.

There are no heroes in Minoan art – only players.