The Indigenous Critique: On the Native American Wisdom We Set Aside

The first volume of this series presented the concept of the indigenous critique - the observations of Native Americans, emerging in their early encounters with European explorers and colonists. These observations, recorded and pondered deeply by their Western counterparts and thinkers in Europe, challenged a broad array of assumptions and notions embraced by Western society and culture - and proved so enlightening as to trigger the Enlightenment... upon which the new United States would be based.

That earlier book sought to meaningfully summarize the Indigenous Critique, but only addressed in passing the selective manner in which the features of Native American societal order were taken up by the United States Founders. There is actually much to be explored and learned in the examination of Native American governance and lifestyle, deriving as it did from many thousands of years of social experimentation and adaptation. This book seeks to go deeper into that exploration.

The fact is that the maturity and sophistication of Native American living - and, by extension, the lifestyles of other indigenous populations and their paleolithic ancestors - can greatly inform us today, particularly in what we can surmise about human nature itself. While we may not be able to emulate them completely, we can at least learn a great deal from those we displaced - knowledge that can, perhaps, be our eventual salvation.