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This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
Questions
The Americas
Table of contents
- What were the most prominent civilizations in the Americas?
- How many people lived in the Americas compared to Europe before Columbus’s arrival?
- What characteristics of pre-Columbian cultures distinguish them from European cultures?
- What symbolic elements do they share with Middle Eastern civilizations?
- How vital was the Andean region for European and global history during the first three centuries of the Conquest (similar to the rest of what is now known as Latin America)?
Ancient Aztec Capital in This Lifelike 3D Rendering
Mesoamérica
(1800: hygiene and life expectancy span. Pre-Columbian people: 41 ys. 1900 in Lat Am: 29 yr)
Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlan (reconstruction, II), video i,
Norteamérica
Iroquois houses, hoʊdɪnoʊˈʃoʊni
Pueblo
Iroquois/Iroqués
Contemporary recreation of a hypothetical comparison
Iroques 1920 https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/iroquois-indian-chief-meets-improved-1872534620
Basths, democracy, 2, property of land, agriculture (Three Sisters / crop rotation), gender roluncontacted es,
South America
The ancient aqueducts keeping Peruvian deserts fertile | AFP
Patagonicos
Further readings
The following chapters are from the book Tawiscara. The Hijacking of Democracy (Jorge Majfud, 2026).
Mesoamerican precedents of egalitarian societies
In 2017, University of Arizona professor Takeshi Inomata and his team discovered a monumental structure 1,400 meters long by 400 meters wide in Mexico, near the border with Guatemala. This gigantic plaza was situated at the intersection of two coordinate axes—or north-south and east-west avenues—each nine and seven kilometers long, in addition to a dam and straight water channels, 35 meters wide and five meters deep.
Radiocarbon dating determined that this structure, part of a larger urban complex, was over three thousand years old (a thousand years before the rise of the Roman Empire) and was inhabited for several centuries. The system of orthogonal lines was designed based on cosmological observations, and, according to the researchers, “the construction of a cosmogram representing the order of the universe and time likely motivated many people to participate in the construction without coercion. Major construction events and collective rituals may also have included feasts, the exchange of goods between different groups, and opportunities for finding a partner, which likely provided additional incentives for people to gather.” It is very likely that Aguada Fénix did not have “rulers comparable to those of the Olmec centers, but there were surely community leaders with a certain degree of prestige and power. The great cosmogram was likely designed by these prominent figures, who possessed specialized skills and knowledge in astronomical observations and calendrical calculations.”[i]
One notable feature reveals that this complex and extensive society was capable of undertaking urban projects that exceeded the size of the Pyramid of Giza in Egypt without having powerful kings or a ruling class capable of imposing privileges on the rest of the population—such as the construction of palaces and monumental tombs—as was the case with other contemporary civilizations and even with civilizations that flourished in the same region, such as the Olmec.[ii]
In historiography, there are far more examples of civilizations based on authoritarian powers than of egalitarian (democratic) societies. This is likely because residential architecture was less expensive and monumental, and thus did not survive the erosion of time like pyramids, temples, fortresses, cathedrals, and palaces. To get an idea of this, simply open any book on the “universal history” of architecture and civilizations at random. It may also be because early societies were structured around myths derived from the structure and psychology of the family, where the father (the mother, in agricultural and less violent civilizations) was the central authority and the children, as today, were obliged to obey, for the good of the entire family.
The same must have been true of the means by which daily stories were transmitted. There are few records of the routine activities and the ideas and emotions of workers in antiquity—and even not so long ago—compared to the records of governments or the ruling classes. On the other hand, unlike ordinary citizens (workers, merchants, mothers, slaves, servants, peasants), kings, the nobility, and the clergy were always obsessed with perpetuating their legacy, sometimes for reasons of ego and sometimes for reasons of class—which amounts to tribal ego.
As if that were not enough, although most intellectuals belonged to the middle and even lower classes, generally speaking—especially before the Enlightenment—most were linked to or survived on the patronage or favor of the privileged classes. In Greece, even with examples of rebellion like Diogenes or Socrates, the salons, bookstores, and free time of philosophers and artists depended on someone else doing their daily work, such as servants and slaves.
In any case, when we speak of the absolute power of the pharaohs and monarchies, as well as examples of egalitarian societies, we can never think of absolute realities. Neither centralized power nor equality can be absolute, abstract realities. What matters to us here, just as when we discuss freedom, slavery, or racism across history and cultures, is to distinguish the degree to which each society moved toward the dictatorship of an elite or toward the distribution of power among its inhabitants.
Although few in number, there are some examples from antiquity, such as Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley (now Pakistan), which flourished 4,500 years ago, where archaeologists continue to debate whether it was an egalitarian civilization or not. In any case, it was a civilization far less centralized and hierarchical than the better-known ones of the time. Other centers of civilization, such as those at Teotihuacán in Mexico, emerged like most early civilizations, as city-states. These, in turn, were organized around myths and urban monuments that secured class privileges for their ruling class, from emperors and priests to the wealthiest nobility.
But the dynamic between classism and equality is far more complex than that. At a certain point in Teotihuacán’s history (around the second century AD), the working classes began to channel their energies into improving their own living conditions, such as building their own homes rather than palaces for the wealthiest class. A century later, the people began to destroy the sacred images of the state religion, constructing buildings with drainage systems, lighting, and painted murals (the ancient ancestors of modern Mexican muralists), in no way revealing any social hierarchy but rather the opposite. These murals of the people were not painted in a village, but in a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants, more than double the population of Rome and London a millennium later. Many of its inhabitants came from other towns and dressed in cotton cloth, more than a thousand years before the Industrial Revolution in England made it popular, expanding American slavery into Mexican territory.
Like every civilization, the Teotihuacan civilization had a life cycle, almost as long as that of the Western Roman Empire. In its final generations, an aristocracy emerged which, in turn, provoked a popular backlash, internal strife, and, ultimately, fires, destruction, and the abandonment of the megacity.
Two thousand years later, and a fifty-day walk to the north, near what is now the capital of Mexico, we find the Republic of Tlaxcala, a confederation that existed for several centuries and withstood the attacks and blockade of the Aztec Empire. Tlaxcala was also a unique form of oligarchic alliance among four peoples without kings or emperors. It was neither a tribe nor a group of villages. As described by Hernán Cortés in 1519, Tlaxcala (Tlashca-lan, “Land of Corn Tortillas”) was a city of 120,000 inhabitants (recent estimates raise the figure to 150,000, three times the population of the then-populous London) and possessed an effective productive organization with intense trade, much like Venice.
As in any other pre-capitalist civilization, the free market was one of the centers of economic and cultural life. Hernán Cortés left the following account: “There is a market in this city where, every single day, there are thirty thousand souls or more buying and selling… Among them there is every kind of good order, and a well- d police force; and they are people of great reason and harmony… This province has many flat, beautiful valleys, all cultivated and sown, with nothing left fallow… The people here are governed in a manner almost like the republics of Venice, Genoa, or Pisa; for there is no single overlord ruling over all. There are many lords, and all reside in this city, and the people of the land are farmers and are vassals of these lords, and each has his own land: some have more than others; and for their wars, which they must organize, they all gather together, and together they organize and agree upon them: It is believed that they must have some form of justice to punish the wicked: for one of the natives of this province stole some gold from a Spaniard, and I told that to Magiscacín, who is the greatest Lord of them all, and they conducted their investigation, and followed him to a city near there, called Churultecal, and from there they brought him back as a prisoner, and handed him over to me along with the gold, and they told me to have him punished.”[iii]
The rivalry between the Tlaxcaltecs and the Aztecs (which ultimately led the former to ally themselves with Cortés against the latter) was not only military but also ideological. The Aztecs were an empire ruled by an emperor, while the Tlaxcaltecs practiced a very limited form of democracy (similar to that of Athens) without an absolute authority.[iv] However, there were other examples closer to Iroquois democracy. For centuries before the fall of Teotihuacan, political power was exercised from the base of the pyramid through popular assemblies.[v] At the same time that the symbolic centers of the official religion were destroyed, the practice of human sacrifice was eliminated—not unlike the history of other civilizations on other continents.
As described by the Spanish scholar and first rector of the University of Mexico in 1553, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, the Tlaxcaltecs were in the habit of deliberating in assembly on the most important decisions of their confederation, a characteristic we find among the native peoples of North America in very different contexts and forms of development.[vi] Furthermore, archaeology has not revealed any central monument of power in Tlaxcala, despite its large population and intense commercial activity.
In North America (“Turtle Island” according to its inhabitants), other societies would follow, such as Kincaid Mounds on the Ohio River, in what is now the state of Illinois to the south. The Ohio River was one of the main trade routes between peoples as far apart as the Iroquois and those of the Mississippi Valley. On this same river, not far from Kincaid, Cahokia developed. In 1739, Pierre Gaullier de Varennes reported on settlements with hundreds of houses along this river that traded with the natives of what is now New Mexico and did not suffer from food shortages in winter. They were not tribes. Although these numerous settlements could be estimated to have between fifteen and twenty thousand inhabitants in each region, that was at the time the entire combined white population of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York. Unlike the Tlaxcaltecs and the Iroquois, the societies along the Mississippi were not democratic but were organized along a vertical axis. Villages such as Kincaid featured pyramid-shaped structures on elevated sites and wooden walls more sophisticated than those of the Iroquois, even though their population was one-tenth the size.
Like any society based on grain production, Cahokia developed into a city-state between 1050 and 1350, becoming an organized city with 15,000 inhabitants—far fewer than Asian or Mesoamerican cities, but comparable to European cities like London or Madrid. If we include the satellite settlements, estimates reach 40,000 inhabitants. At its peak, the Cahokians were fond of a ball game played between two teams of ten players on a rectangular field, the origin of today’s lacrosse, although in the northern regions it consisted of a day of competition and the number of players could reach the hundreds.
By the 11th century, Cahokia—North America’s first state based on grain accumulation—had pyramid-shaped structures, and its ruling class began a policy of controlling outsiders in the city and its surrounding villages. Like the Aztecs, this attempt at control by the ruling class manifested in internal violence, such as public or ritual executions of young women. Almost at the same time that the Cahokians were in decline, the northernmost peoples of the Iroquois culture emerged. All evidence suggests that these societies were forms of republics—that is, with authorities legitimized by debate and popular representation—including Cahokia before its process of accumulation and decline.[vii]
According to Rousseau and his contemporary followers, it was the invention of agriculture, particularly with its creation of a surplus of food production, that brought an end to egalitarian societies.[1] The dispute over the administration of that surplus not only created the first forms of the state but also of social classes. To this we must add the creation of nationalist and more violent religions over larger groups, capable of imposing effective coercion through a common idea of what is and what ought to be—through fear, ritual, psychological terrorism, and duty beyond one’s own life.
It is reasonable to speculate that grains were the first forms of currency due to their durability and, consequently, one of the instruments of accumulation and power. However, we must not forget that the Iroquois Confederacy and other similar groups also used a form of money, even more abstract than grains, based on colored beads (chaquiras, in Mexico), copper, or wampum strings made from seashells, used even by the colonists for trade with the Iroquois and Algonquin natives.
Capitalism radicalized the concentration of value through the (speculative) commodification of land in England and the possibility of accumulating private property in a single hand through the abstraction of the power of money. Although the ideal of Marxist communism closely resembles the communism of those native peoples without pyramids, such as the Iroquois or the Tlaxcaltecs, on a planet dominated by capitalism, the solutions that attempted or sought to limit this progressive accumulation through abstraction resorted to the opposite: a centralized state almost as abstract as capital—which, more often than not, ended up being bought by private capital.
[1] Since Engels’ time, it has been assumed that not only did great civilizations arise from agriculture, but that they arose more from the need to gather fodder for domesticated animals—the primary sources of meat and milk in the winters—than from the need to gather grain, especially among Aryans and Semites.
[i] Takeshi Inomata, et al. “Landscape-Wide Cosmogram Built by the Early Community of Aguada Fénix in Southeastern Mesoamerica.” *Science Advances*, vol. 11, no. 45, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Nov. 2025.
[ii] Inomata, Takeshi, et al. “Monumental Architecture at Aguada Fénix and the Rise of Maya Civilization.” Nature, vol. 582, no. 7813, Springer Science and Business Media LLC, June 2020, pp. 530–33.
[iii] Cortés, Hernán. Letter of Account. Mexico City, National Polytechnic Institute, 2019. p. 29.
[iv] Graeber, David, and Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, p. 349.
[v] Graeber, David and Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, pp. 340–343.
[vi] Graeber, David and Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, pp. 352–353.
[vii] Graeber, David and Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, p. 466.
A Meteorite Called Democracy
By the 17th century, capitalism had already been born, though it was in its infancy and urgently needed to be changed. As we analyzed in Flies in the Web (2023), its origin was neither Italian banking nor Dutch trade. Financial innovations (banking, stock exchanges, corporations, and joint-stock companies) were merely an instrument; the millennia-old free market was merely the first victim of its development. Capitalism was born with the system of enclosure—the fencing off and privatization of medieval communal lands in England—and continued with the same idea across the rest of the world: over the lands of colonies on other continents and over the bodies of their inhabitants, privatized and commodified first as slaves in chains, and later as indentured laborers.
Almost at the same time that European capitalism created its imperialism—genocidal and extractive—its population was sinking into dissatisfaction, largely because the expectations of achieving a new meaning of existence (success and wealth, imposed not only culturally but also religiously, with the simultaneous birth of Protestantism) could not be met and, later, because the Industrial Revolution would ultimately plunge the working class of the imperial metropolises into poverty and material despair.
By the 18th century, intellectuals—at least those who were not in need of wealth—had almost completely broken free from their patrons, the ruling class. Their income began to depend more on the petty bourgeoisie and, later, on the working class through the new readers of newspapers and books. By then, the ideas of liberty, equality, and democracy (fraternité) had long been circulating in the conscious mind and, above all, in the popular—collective—unconscious.
From the early years of the American conquest, the European counter-narrative had been filled with countless stories, ideas, debates, and fantasies about the American paradise— —and, above all, about what was missing in the increasingly powerful Europe, centuries before the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité—that is, fraternity, solidarity, and democracy. Three ideas, three values that clashed head-on with the reality of developing capitalism and imperialism. As we shall see—or rather, as we shall propose later—in this context, both realities, the capitalist and the anti-capitalist, were inescapable.
How was the contradiction resolved? There were and are only two ways: (1) demonize the enemy; (2) co-opt it. Both options were and still are practiced, but by far the second was and is the most effective: redefining democracy and freedom—even equality—to make them compatible with capitalism, with private property, with the power of the nobles of the Middle Ages transformed into the liberals of the Modern Age.
The ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity were central to the Native American nations that the Europeans discovered, to their astonishment, in the Americas—from the explorers and missionaries to the intellectuals who never left their own continent. From there, we have a long history of both praise and rejection.
We will delve deeper into this later, but for now, to keep it brief, we will recall that Chateaubriand, in his novel Atala (1801), was one of the first writers to relativize, from a Christian perspective, the Rousseauian idea of the “noble savage,” which had emerged half a century earlier. Then, throughout the 20th century, as a reaction to the politically engaged intellectuals who particularly concerned CIA literary critics—anti-capitalists, Marxists, and advocates for indigenous cultures—essays by graduate students and commercial books proliferated, always prefacing “the myth of” with “noble savage.” This is easy to criticize, since attributing sanctity to any human group is a project doomed to failure and another form of dehumanization.
In this study, we are not interested in discussing something so irrelevant, but rather in analyzing the influence of Native American cultures on the Enlightenment and on the concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality in order to understand the 21st century. The devastating influence—the meteorite—the historical catalyst for a supercycle, the Enlightenment; not the invention of its concepts.
Many Native American confederacies (such as the Iroquois, Wendat-Huron, Powhatan, Wampanoag, Cherokee, Tlaxcala, among others) were, in theory and in practice, consistent examples of real democracy. This influence was also radicalized by the explorers’ own entourage and, above all, by the intellectuals who never set foot in the Americas but later changed the countercultural history of Europe, the West, and the rest of the world.
To return to a brief answer before delving deeper, we might conjecture that this process began as soon as Columbus set foot on San Salvador and, the following year, published his famous letter to the Catholic monarchs. Almost immediately, this was followed by the letters of Amerigo Vespucci and the fictional book based on them, *Utopia*, by the English chancellor Thomas More, who was later executed for treason for refusing to renounce his Catholicism.
On the same issue, and also as a counter-narrative, Michel de Montaigne’s essays were published at the end of the century. The same was true of Shakespeare at the beginning of the following century, leading up to the wave of artistic and philosophical output by numerous French writers, shortly before Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Following this chain of events, we arrive at the 19th century, with the utopian socialists and, later, the so-called scientific socialists. By the time Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto (1848), they were influenced by earlier utopians and by the French culture of the era, which was rife with (now American) references to Native Americans, such as James Cooper’s historical novel The Last of the Mohicans (1821) or the prolific work of Henry Schoolcraft, begun more than a decade earlier. Also relevant were ethnological works such as Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851), in which the author Henry Schoolcraft analyzes the egalitarian and self-governing system of Native nations—at that time, the word “democracy” was not in common use and was as suspect, avoided, or condemned as the word “communism” has been since the Cold War. Later, toward the end of their lives, Marx and Engels not only read but also studied and wrote about other American anthropologists who provided more rigorous data and analysis, such as Lewis Morgan. We will explore this further later on.
However, the relationship between the absence (or restriction) of private property and its connection to equality, social harmony, and ecology had already been articulated by Rousseau a century earlier, drawing on sources and ideas—rarely cited directly—that originated with Native American peoples themselves. The socialists—later called utopians half a century later—Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen—did not cite Native Americans as sources of inspiration, but by the end of the 18th century, the Enlightenment had already matured and moved beyond its foundational stage. One might even speculate—since there are no explicit references but rather an avalanche of evidence of a cultural phenomenon impossible to deny—that the idea of Fourier’s phalansteries has much in common with the socio-architectural system of the Iroquois Confederacy: the longhouses— —in which several families lived together, and the League of Peace itself, which was viewed by its inhabitants as a great longhouse—Haudenosaunee—in which the five nations resided. This idea and reality had been known in France since the 17th century through the chronicles of Captain Samuel de Champlain and the many volumes published in Paris by Jesuit missionaries who were never able to convert the Iroquois to Christianity.[1]
Chronologically speaking, between the socialists and the communists come the defined anarchists, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His book What Is Property? (1840) presents the problem of property (“la propriété, c’est le vol,” “property is theft”) as a central element of his sociopolitical thought. For Proudhon, the right to property is not absolute but a convenient convention for appropriating the labor of others and radicalizing social differences. These ideas would be central to the thought of Marx and Engels.
The relationship between property and democracy, and between democracy and indigenous communism, is central to this study of real democracy among Native Americans. Socialists, anarchists, and communists had more in common with Native American cultures than with European ones. By miles, kilometers, and leagues.
The Great Myth of Inequality
The central thesis of this book is that the genuine democracy of the indigenous peoples of North America—particularly that of the Iroquois—as documented in the abundant and influential chronicles of the French Jesuits, served as the catalyst for the European counter-narrative to nascent capitalism. This counter-narrative matured during the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries and led to the Age of Revolutions.[2] This cultural revolution (albeit limited to an influential intellectual elite), which would lead to a political revolution, rediscovered democracy and the more radical idea of equality, which began to be expressed in political and constitutional ideals starting with the U.S. Constitution of 1789 and the French Revolution that same year.
However, both ideas, principles, and values were hijacked by the ruling class, as has happened throughout history. Although the catalyst was genuine indigenous democracy, in practice the model that prevailed was that of the restricted democracy of ancient Greece. As we analyzed in Flies in the Web (2023), it is no coincidence that modern liberals were a continuation and legacy of the medieval nobles who opposed the centralized power of kings. Although the idea of indigenous equality was radical and included as a right all social groups within a nation, all genders (men, women, lesbians, and gay men), and all adopted ethnic and linguistic groups, in liberal democracies the old idea of equality prevailed: equality and social justice among equals; that is, within each of the different social classes, whose members were valued and judged according to the class-based laws of their social class. With the Enlightenment revolution, the tradition of class-based equality was abolished, and a common understanding emerged that laws should be universal regardless of race, religion, and social class. Of course, universal only within a single country. Marxism would break that nationalist mold a century later.
Perhaps one could say that Freemasonry is the sectarian interpretation of Enlightenment equality. By 1734, Benjamin Franklin was already Grand Master of the Philadelphia Lodge. That is to say, one year after the founding of the Grand Lodge of Boston in a rum-soaked tavern, as was the custom of the euphoric ideas of nascent Freemasonry—far removed from Indigenous culture, which opposed addictions and found the same euphoria in ways we may have forgotten today. Thus, by the end of the 18th century, the champions of equality agreed that the problem of Native Americans and Black people was what in the 19th and 20th centuries (Jim Crow laws) would be known as “separate but equal”: Native Americans on reservations and Black people in Africa—or in ghettos, whether rural for Native Americans or urban for freed Black people.
During the Enlightenment, the idea of a common genetic origin had the appeal of being a scientific theory while also aligning with Christian creationism. By then, the French mathematician and theorist Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc) had already published his monogenetic and evolutionary theory, largely in *De la dégénération des animaux* (1766), which was widely read and accepted by intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, no one of even moderate education could maintain that men had not been created equal or did not share a common origin.
However, just as the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence asserts that “all men are created equal” and the 1789 Constitution speaks in the name of “We the people,” in no case did that equality include the majority of the population: women, Indigenous peoples, mestizos, mulattos, poor whites, Blacks, and slaves of all kinds.
In other words, not only did Western liberal democracy align with the restrictive examples of democracy in ancient Greece, but so did the very concept of equality itself. Even today, liberal democracies are plutocracies (consider the origin of liberalism as a continuation of the feudal nobility expanded by capitalism), even more restrictive and concentrating of power than in classical antiquity, where there were limits on accumulation through taxation.
Today, the very concept of equality is brutally restricted: we are all equal before the law, but not before justice. A bicycle thief is a thousand times more likely to go to jail within days than a millionaire who defrauded millions by manipulating a country’s laws, the investments of the exclusive hedge fund club, or indebted an entire country for his own benefit and that of his friends. A cell phone thief is more likely to end up lynched or in prison than a pedophile from the ruling class—the Epstein files are proof of this. Justice is not blind. Justice is blindfolded because it has been hijacked or is masochistic.
For these reasons, it is neither ironic nor contradictory that, while European philosophers and revolutionaries admired indigenous societies for the social and existential ideals they envied and promoted, they held them up as examples of what they did not want or what was not possible. They did not want to be savages like the peoples belonging to inferior races. They did not want to lose their class privileges or their old dreams of imperial nations, modeled in the image and likeness of admirable Rome and the accursed China or Baghdad. To this end, they rationalized (even Rousseau himself) that the rules of democracy and equality were only possible in “primitive societies,” in small societies, in the “lost paradise” that could never return. The same applies to gender equality. For Rousseau, women were not equal to men, at least in terms of civil rights.[i]
His contemporary and icon of liberalism, Adam Smith—who today would be accused of being a social democrat—continued this line of thought originating from a Europe plagued by misery, murder, and urban filth, yet proud of its architecture and military might: “The first period of society, that of hunters, admits of no such inequality. universal poverty establishes universal equality, and superiority, whether by age or personal qualities, are the weak but sole foundations of authority and subordination. Therefore, there is little or no authority or subordination in this period of society. The second period of society, that of the herders, admits of great inequalities of fortune, and there is no period in which the superiority of fortune confers so much authority upon those who possess it. Consequently, there is no period in which authority and subordination are more perfectly established. The authority of an Arab sherif is very great; that of a Tartar khan, completely despotic.”[ii]
In the middle, with their women neither as fully clothed as in the Middle East nor as scantily clad as in Africa, were (and still are) the European supremacists. For indigenous peoples such as the Iroquois—even for those who visited Europe—these fruits of progress were illusory. It is not that the savages lacked authority, but rather that this authority was legitimized, not by economic power or by some psychopathology of accumulation and power, but quite the opposite: by the leader’s ability to convince others through arguments of the merits of his proposals. It is not that the natives desired something they did not have, but rather, as they themselves expressed it, they did not desire something that would take away their freedom.
However, not only were the societies of the North American indigenous peoples characterized by egalitarian (communist) democracy—and their populations were not small (the Iroquois population alone was as large as that of London before the European pandemics)—but the idea that there is a correlation between inequality and economic progress contradicts what we can observe across various continents.
Even if we limit our focus to the Americas, we see that, from the North Pole to the South Pole, Spanish, Portuguese, and Anglo-Saxon colonization exacerbated social inequalities while simultaneously deepening poverty. The palaces and mansions with marble staircases were not meant for workers, much less for Indigenous peoples. For them, there was only physical and moral suffering.
For centuries, territorial colonization and, later, the socioeconomic colonization of the Global South reduced the life expectancy of its inhabitants from 45 years (higher than in Europe for centuries) to 29 years in the middle of the 20th century, as was the case in wealthy countries such as the Congo or Bolivia. Imperialism and colonial brutality also reduced the average height of its population, while increasing addiction to alcohol and tobacco and rates of depression and suicide.[3]
In other words, for centuries of colonization, inequality did not mean material progress, but quite the opposite. When it did mean progress, it was for a minority. While John Locke in the late 17th century, Adam Smith a century later, and neoliberals more than three centuries later argued that inequality was both the cause and consequence of social progress, England was benefiting from the expansion of slavery in India, the United States, and Brazil—suppliers of white gold and other vital resources for its industries. At the same time that mega-fortunes were consolidating in the American South and the corporations that today dominate the world economy were being founded, Black people lived in slavery and poor white people in servitude (if not indentured servitude) for just a few centuries. Simultaneously, in the centers of European imperialism, as material prosperity and social development increased and life expectancy and the stature of the population improved three centuries after the birth of capitalism, inequality was reduced.
Explanations for this new prosperity and development in Europe (often ideological and cultural, if not racist) consistently attribute all the benefits to capitalism. They ignore basic realities: life expectancy in Europe improved centuries later due to the introduction of hygiene—known and practiced by indigenous peoples for centuries—as well as the use of soap and chemical medicines, known in the abominable Muslim civilizations of the East and by the savage indigenous peoples of the Far West.
Above all, they ignore that all that prosperity, reaching its peak during the Belle Époque (the Beautiful Era, from the second half of the 19th century until World War I), was sustained by the exploitation of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—continents that, in turn, were used as examples of economic, cultural, mental, and even racial backwardness.
The most egalitarian continent before the European invasion was what is now the Americas. It was more egalitarian than Medieval Europe and more so than capitalist Europe until the introduction of the welfare state, which turned that continent into one of the most equitable, especially in the Scandinavian countries. It goes without saying that medieval Europe and the Europe of the first three centuries of capitalism, despite global plunder, were much poorer than today’s Europe, plagued by “socialist” programs—quite the opposite of the neocolonial capitalist countries characterized by historic and brutal social disparities.
[1] The French explorer Samuel de Champlain, founder of the city of Quebec in 1608, believed that the Great Lakes of the north (Michigan-Huron) led to the old European obsession: China. This error, like almost all the delusions of powerful groups and individuals, shaped history forever. By 1700, New France was the first and largest European colony in North America. The colony was organized by the French Jesuits and came to occupy two-thirds of the northern part of the continent.
[2] This intellectualization is drawn from Eric Hobsbawm’s book *The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848*. The chosen years seem debatable, as the period could be extended at least to the Russian Revolution of 1917, but Hobsbawm refers to bourgeois, liberal revolutions, not anti-bourgeois revolutions. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the latter are a continuation of the former in their concept of equality—even if it is a different idea of equality.
[3] Tobacco is of American origin, but smoking is European, like most, if not all, addictions promoted by consumerism and the commodification of existence.
[i] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile: Or, On Education. Australia, Floating Press, 2009, pp. 361, 728.
[ii] Smith, Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations. New York, Random House, 1937, Book V, p. 672.
A healthy mind in a healthy body in a healthy community
Not without cruel irony, European plagues decimated the native population while the very introduction of new foods and powerful natural fertilizers—such as guano from the invaded continent—saved Europe’s exhausted lands and multiplied its population—the very same population that would spill over to the other side of the Atlantic to strip the natives of their lands and confine them to concentration camps called reservations.
Another factor—for which I am unaware of any studies to support my claim—is that Europe not only felt the cultural and ideological impact of Native American societies, but also very likely ended up adopting hygiene practices (at least some of them) as a result of this very cultural contact (and clash). It was due to these new hygiene practices that, by the early 19th century, Europeans began to live longer and have larger families than Native Americans. We can also say, based on various studies, that the practice of modern medicine is a continuation of several scientific traditions, such as the Arab tradition. As we will see later, different social, existential, and political aspects of indigenous peoples reveal a more advanced wisdom and an unfair portrayal stemming from the arrogance of the European colonizer.
Briefly, let us take a look at an important topic that lies outside the central theme of this book: the medicinal knowledge of the American peoples, particularly the peoples of the North, those encountered by the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon colonists in their rise to colonize the world.
Indigenous peoples had not separated the material world from the spiritual world, as Renaissance Europeans did and, even more radically, as the capitalist mindset did. Indeed, the Western categories of body, mind, soul, and spirit did not correspond to those of the natives. In many cultures, the mind, the heart, and the breath were connected to ideas and emotions. Spirit could mean mind, and soul something that could leave the body while one sleeps. I believe that the very category of lesbians and gay men as “two-spirit people” (in modern parlance) confirms this idea. The very lack of words like soul or sin among the natives was a source of frustration for Catholic priests attempting to Christianize the colonized peoples.
The natives did not separate humans from the rest of nature, much less separate the mind from the body, as formulated by Plato, René Descartes two millennia later, and practiced by the conquerors who, in this way, felt no remorse for exploiting material resources (the new still life), such as gold, silver, guano, trees, rivers, Black people, women, the poor…
According to the earliest chronicles of the French Jesuits in the Great Lakes region, for Native Americans there were three forms of illness: (1) the unsatisfied or desire-filled unconscious, a phenomenon rooted in the mind that ultimately made the rest of the body sick; (2) the natural wear and tear of old age; and (3) afflictions caused by shamans (healers).
Among their therapies or healing practices, the Jesuits describe how the natives would sweat in smoke huts and then plunge into cold lakes.[i] They placed special importance on the workings of the mind, from the need for inner peace to the care of dreams and desires—which were not merely individual concerns but matters of the community. In social psychology, they considered that losing one’s composure and the ability to express frustrations in words during a conflict was a sign of weakness or immaturity—especially intolerable in a leader who, by losing the ability to convince others, lost his authority due to the simple disobedience of those who chose not to follow him.
From the onset of colonization, the natives were described as savages, sinners, and irrational for not accepting or questioning the existence of hell, sin, Christian miracles, and European freedom. By 1600, European medicine was attempting to explain and cure ailments based on Galen’s fantastical theory of the Four Humors and prohibiting bathing, considering it a source of physical and moral diseases. According to the Jesuits, “the entire race is ignorant of medicine,” even though the natives based their cures on herbs—knowledge organized and transmitted through rituals. Indeed, this (not the theory and practice of the humors) would form the basis of the pharmaceutical synthesis of modern medicine.
When the Jesuits lost a patient, they referred to them as “saved for Heaven” thanks to the holy water of baptism. When the natives lost a family member, they held a three-day funeral to allow their friends from other villages to attend the feast and proceeded with a dance ceremony to cheer the spirit of the dead, which offended European sensibilities.[ii] At the time of the burial, a person would give a speech recalling human nature, destined for death, for which only “patientiam” (probably “resignation”) was appropriate.[iii]
But Isla Tortuga could neither foresee nor prepare for the catastrophe of the Three Horsemen of Death: germs, gunpowder, and fanaticism from across the ocean. During the evangelization of the native peoples, converts often mentioned that in the not-too-distant past their villages had been as numerous as the hairs on a head. The native peoples were decimated by European diseases such as smallpox or the flu, for which neither native nor European medicine had a cure, nor does it have one today. The deadly smallpox began to recede in Europe in the early 19th century, when medicine regained the scientific approach it had possessed centuries earlier in the Islamic Empire, and the British physician Edward Jenner introduced the vaccine, based on immunization with cow pus.[1]
The indigenous people lacked the antibodies that Europeans had developed over centuries of plagues and poor hygiene, both personal and urban. Were it not for this catastrophe of invisible enemies, imported all at once to Isla Tortuga, native medicine was highly effective, not only because of the knowledge accumulated over centuries and millennia regarding natural resources (such as herbs, fats, and minerals), massages, and basic surgeries to cure or prevent ailments, but also because of the physical and psychological integration of its treatments and therapies.
Consistent with their greater “sexual liberalism” among men and women, the natives knew and practiced contraception and even abortion using herbs. One of the least tolerated practices was adultery and deception, which in some cases could be punished with physical punishment.[iv] Limited, like all medicine of the time, native medicine was less rooted in superstitions than European medicine. It was, among other reasons (such as social care for the elderly and sick), one of the reasons why Native Americans were taller, more hygienic, lived longer, and worked fewer days than Europeans—especially during the Industrial Revolution. According to the natives themselves, they were also more rational and freer.
This type of medicine, which had achieved—along with a solid and effective social care system—a higher life expectancy and better health than in Europe, was demonized by European superstitions. Providing therapy based on processed herbs and , along with rituals and prayers that did not align with Christian prayers, was considered superstition and diabolical heresy.
Gradually, and after at least three centuries, the highly inefficient European medicine—riddled with fantasies, superstitions, and racial and sexual prejudices (as detailed in the books of the renowned physician Juan Huarte de San Juan)—evolved toward a more rational and scientific approach to biological problems. This can also be understood as a radicalization of native medicine, which used to extract active ingredients from herbs, but it also led to the capitalist commercialization of its solutions, such as the prescription of synthetic drugs for any ailment.
In the Cahokia civilization in the Mississippi Valley and in other communities, from present-day northern Mexico to New York, infusions of yaupon—a plant rich in caffeine that is still sold in supermarkets as kombucha, matcha, or yaupon tea—were prepared. For thousands of years, Native Americans used it in varying doses for digestive cleansing or to boost energy levels. According to the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Native Americans used it to induce vomiting when they were sick, and they did so easily and without hesitation.
In agriculture, the indigenous people practiced a system of working in harmony with nature, a concept now recognized by organic farming. Their “Three Sisters” system combined the cultivation of squash, beans, and corn to maintain the soil’s fertility cycle. The corn provided structural support for the beans and produced carbohydrates, but it depleted the soil due to its high nitrogen consumption. In contrast, the beans contributed the nitrogen they absorbed from the air. The squash plant provided shade for the soil, reducing evaporation and nitrogen loss, as well as suppressing other weeds that competed with the corn and beans. This is a modern scientific explanation that the indigenous people understood differently. Perhaps in a way that we cannot fully grasp.
They also discovered crop rotation, which they achieved by dividing the available plots into three, leaving one fallow to allow for recovery. This, which to modern eyes seems like a mere anecdote, was in reality an invention of far greater importance to humanity than the Internet. By far. Everything was done without “intellectual property,” without strict and abstract national borders, and without neurotic fencing off of individual plots—which to European settlers meant “absence of private property” and justified the seizure of those lands and the dehumanization of the “savages,” as a preliminary step to their dispossession and elimination.
Apart from the lands, the colonists and corporations privatized various indigenous discoveries such as preservatives, aspirin, quinine, anesthetics, antiseptics, and the very concept of vaccination. Indigenous peoples studied the effects and processed the bark, leaves, roots, and seeds of various plants, boiling them repeatedly to extract their properties. They dried and ground roots and seeds to extract alkaloids that were then used as anesthetics for surgeries or to treat and dress wounds with hair or strands of plant fibers, while in Europe they amputated patients’ legs with saws and other unsterilized instruments, holding patients down by force—in North America and, above all, in the Andean region, for example, brain surgeries performed by the Incas and other peoples centuries before the arrival of Europeans had a survival rate of nearly 90 percent.[v]
Indigenous knowledge of herbs and other natural products not only classified each plant according to its medicinal benefits but also perfected the practice of distillation and the careful prescription of doses that prevented poisoning. All of this was based on the observation of cause and effect. The chants and rituals, aside from establishing a connection with nature and prescribing a breathing rhythm, had a hypnotic effect on patients, which facilitated treatment. None of this existed in Europe, but newspapers and films later took pleasure in mocking the indigenous people for invoking some nonexistent god.
As a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis, reported in 2000, “many botanical products sold today as dietary supplements in the United States were used by Native Americans for similar purposes. These supplements represent only a small fraction of the more than 2,500 different plant species of vascular taxa and the more than 2,800 species of all taxa known to have been valued for their medicinal properties by the indigenous inhabitants of the North American continent.”[vi] Years later, the same page on the U.S. Embassy in Italy acknowledged: “The world can thank Native Americans, and in particular the Iroquois and Seneca tribes, for inventing baby bottles and formula, which were important for the health of infants when breast milk was not available… Native Americans invented syringes.”[vii]
In addition to the baby bottles they made from bear intestines and filled with nutrients when the mother could not provide her milk, the Iroquois and other peoples of Turtle Island had invented anesthesia, which they prepared using an extract of jimsonweed, a poisonous plant abundant on various continents, and used syringes to inject medications into the patient.No superstitions, but solutions derived from experimentation and the observation of nature.[2]
For European fanatics, the fact that most of the natives died from the plagues that the colonists imported from Europe (and which native biology was unfamiliar with, due to their passage through the icy filter of the Bering Strait and their superior hygiene) was proof of the superiority of Christian faith and medicine.
For the civilized settlers and missionaries, medicine meant inducing vomiting; cleansing the intestines with enemas; cutting off ears to relieve pain; letting leeches suck blood; drinking bull’s blood if the patient was a man, or menstrual blood if she was a woman; drilling holes in the patient’s skull to expel evil spirits; applying mercury-based ointments or ingesting mercury jellies mixed with honey; not bathing for a year to avoid contracting some indecent disease… All accompanied by their own symbols of crucifixes and prayers.
Like the natives of Tortuga Island, European doctors sometimes recommended exercise through dancing, but the savages’ most joyful dances around a bonfire were proof of their superstitions.
Resistance to plagues and European fanaticism
Nothing guarantees that jumping around a communal bonfire would be worse than living as prisoners of our individualistic loneliness, chained to a digital screen and alleviating our depression with some other addiction. If we consider that all peoples and civilizations evolve, surely that bonfire today would be a different kind of club, surely more communal than the clubs of our time.
The last thing we want here is to idealize or romanticize a (nearly) lost world, but rather to question our vain arrogance. What we can say, objectively, is that democracy and freedom did not arrive on the New World with the Europeans, but were destroyed in that very place and at that very moment. When someone mocks an indigenous rights activist for wearing a watch or using a cell phone, they assume that native cultures were incapable of technological progress and social change—unlike the Europeans, who, when they arrived on the New World, had the worst hygiene and health habits and, one suspects, knew nothing of wristwatches or smartphones.
On the other hand, Columbus’s enthusiasm regarding the naivety of the indigenous people—who would grasp his sword by the wrong end and cut off their own hands—and his belief that it would be easy to enslave them through the use of weapons, trade, or the colonists’ fanatical superstition, speaks volumes about the history that followed and about our cultural and civilizational DNA.
Columbus did not bring only biological plagues. To begin with, for the inhabitants of that small Caribbean island, a little mirror was worth as much as what they gave the Spaniards in exchange—something that, when done by Europeans, was considered cunning and, later in books celebrating capitalism, a natural logic of the market. Something that the contemporary ego ignores, forgets, or fails to consider is that this was a millennia-old practice in any culture one might consider.
The natives were not defeated by the superior intelligence of the Europeans, but by their superior fanaticism (religious, ideological, and warlike); by their cruelty and by their resistance to centuries of plagues and pestilences brought to Abya Yala, which devastated the native population. Not only did ninety percent of their population perish from European plagues, but the survivors felt the economic, psychological, and moral impact of that catastrophe, for which they received not a drop of Christian compassion, but quite the opposite: cruelty, slavery, colonization, dehumanization, and contempt. What smallpox did not kill, alcohol corrupted. What the cannons did not steal, the law and false peace treaties expropriated. What the slaveholders did not despise, the books and supremacist theories humiliated and caused the colonized slaves and collaborators to flagellate themselves.
Shortly after being betrayed by the weakness of Moctezuma II and decimated by the plagues and greed of Hernán Cortés’s men, the Mexicans rebelled against both. In other empires, such as the Inca, the people were also betrayed by the native nobility, as is often the case (since before the time of Jesus) in favor of colonization by a foreign power.
Many other peoples rebelled or resisted and, for that very reason, were labeled as savages, violent, rebellious, and terrorists, as was the case with many peoples in South America. The same was true in North America. Not only were the native peoples superior in social organization and physical health, not only did they live longer and in greater communal peace than the Europeans, but they were reasonably well organized for their own defense—though they knew nothing of preemptive attacks or invasion driven by material greed, much less by individual wealth.
They were far from foolish. Along the coasts of what are now the states from Vermont to New York, the natives traded using canoes and small boats to prevent Europeans from coming ashore to explore the area and continue spreading their deadly germs. According to historians like Ned Blackhawk, by 1610, two-thirds of the population of the Northeast had already perished, and the natives had correctly attributed this to plagues brought by foreigners from across the ocean.[viii]
The Iroquois Confederacy, which we know best for having focused for centuries on the goal of peace, was also the one that insisted on coexistence among different peoples and among its own inhabitants—a diverse population that included foreigners, speakers of different languages, and people of different genders. The Iroquois League was the one that best resisted European invasion and extermination, even managing to expand throughout the Ohio River basin in response to attacks by white settlers, although its very name comes from neighboring tribes that allied with the invaders and called them Iroquois—“rattlesnakes” or “dangerous people.”[3]
Thanks to their superior social organization, their refusal to accept the settlers’ money and instead impose their own currency (wampums) for trade, and their rejection of the concept of sin due to lack of faith and of hell as punishment, the Iroquois—who called themselves “people of the longhouses”—withstood the military attacks of the English and French, but not the catastrophe of the new plagues. In 1535, this confederation suffered the greatest demographic decline in its known history with the arrival of the first European carrying smallpox. Two centuries later, with the arrival of horses, a similar catastrophe would be repeated in the Dakotas. Archaeological evidence indicates that the European epidemics that devastated countless peoples across North America occurred before the natives saw the first white men as death.[ix] That is to say, in many cases—probably in most—the natives were attacked and defeated by European diseases before they had the opportunity to confront the European settlers.
When Native peoples saw a white man for the first time, they did not believe them to be gods, as the Europeans themselves claimed, simply because the natives did not believe in anthropomorphic gods in the style of the ancient Greeks or modern Christians. In fact, they were more likely to consider them animal-like creatures, due to their profuse hair on their chests and faces, and an unmistakable stench resulting from poor hygiene, which is why at first they held them in esteem and appreciation, just as they esteemed the rest of nature. The pallor of their bodies did not impress them as much as the amount of hair, and above all, they were very likely to consider them shamans (healers or animals with special powers), because they were immune to the diseases the Europeans themselves brought.
This catastrophe not only decimated the native population but also disrupted the social order that had been established for centuries; consequently, we could argue that all subsequent European accounts of the American reality focused solely on the little that had survived the holocaust, now invisible to the eyes of history because the native nations were rooted in the oral memory of their peoples and, in particular, in the memory of their sages, as is still the case, albeit to a lesser degree, with cultures grounded in writing.[4]
Unlike the Hurons (Wandat), the Iroquois survived the European empires because of their independence: through their monetary independence, their resistance to the invaders’ religion, and their union (confederation) with other Native peoples of different languages and cultures, which strengthened them against the warlike psychopathy of the settlers—a reality that once again reminds us of the historical and current situation in regions such as Latin America.[5]
In times of plagues, weakness, and wars with European powers, the Iroquois Great League of Peace did not flee, but rather expanded westward through the Ohio Valley and counterattacked eastward.[6] Perhaps it could have continued into Sioux territories, but both peoples adhered to the principle of prioritizing their native neighbors over Europeans in their peace treaties. On the other hand, the Iroquois Confederacy considered itself a people of the forests, while the Sioux Confederacy dominated the plains. One group lived off agriculture, hunting, and fishing, and their rivers served as avenues of trade and communication; the other lived off bison and had already adopted horses, as in the steppes of Asia. The two Native powers respected one another. They never waged endemic wars, unlike the European powers addicted to gunpowder, capital, and religious fanaticism.
It is not a paradox but a historical pattern that peoples are, with some frequency, known by the name given to them by their rivals. In the case of the Iroquois, this name—later Frenchified—meant “snakes,” in a pejorative sense. According to historians, the Iroquois called themselves Haudenosaunee, that is, “the people of the longhouses,” which, we might speculate, is also a name given by foreigners, since no one is surprised by something that has been commonplace to them for centuries.[7] A Frenchman, in the mid-17th century, not without a preference for the colonized Hurons of the north, noted: “Of all the nations in this country, only the Hurons surpass them in intelligence… [The Iroquois] have an excellent memory and devote a good part of their time to recalling events from the past. That is why they never forget anything. There is no nation in the world more political than this one, which is why they know very well how to govern themselves. They are always communicating with one another and among the different peoples.”[x]
The recitation and teaching of wampum kept alive the memory, culture, and values of the Confederacy of Peace, enabling it to successfully resist colonial brutality from the early 17th century until the founding of the United States in 1776. Their greatest defeats were due to attacks by settlers allied with rival tribes—a process that ended with the defeat of those allied tribes as well—and which closely resembles the betrayals and alliances promoted by Great Britain in India and Bangladesh.[xi] In fact, this strategy of maintaining rivalries among Native peoples or driving them to a higher level of bellicosity to keep them fragmented is already mentioned as a strategy in the early 17th century in the Jesuit chronicles.[xii] Not only did Samuel de Champlain promote these wars to keep the natives occupied and prevent them from attempting to reclaim the areas dominated by the French forts, but the first recorded victory of a Quebecois people against the Iroquois was thanks to the provision of muskets by the French. The victors took fifty Iroquois scalps.[xiii]
However, the Confederacy of Peace, known and recognized for its democratic and pacifist success, in the mid-17th century, led by the Mohawks (the wolves), rebelled against the occupiers and in defense of their beaver fur trade, which had declined due to trade with the Europeans. In 1638, with some Dutch weapons, it ended up expanding its territory at the expense of the peoples armed by the French—by then the Hurons, Mohicans, Wenros, Eries, Neutrals, and Northern Algonquins.[8]
In some cases, this rivalry predated the arrival of the Europeans, but the Frenchman Samuel de Champlain, as early as the late 16th century, managed to coordinate an alliance of Native peoples against the Iroquois to wrest the fur trade from them. Champlain himself acknowledged that his plan, from the moment of his arrival, was to instigate a war between the rival nations for purely commercial purposes.[xiv]
In 1641, the Iroquois proposed a peace agreement with the French governor. It was rejected, and the rebellions continued for three more generations, in some cases resulting in brutal massacres on both sides. Some orphaned women and children were captured as servants but ended up being adopted by the new communities.
Until the 18th century, the Iroquois maintained an alliance with the Dutch because the latter were interested in trade, not in the appropriation (privatization) of land—which was the true origin of capitalism (enclosure) two centuries earlier in England and the reason why the Netherlands, the greatest European power at the time, came to be known by historians as “the failed beginning” of capitalism. With the departure of the Dutch, the Iroquois formed a new defensive alliance with the English, which would eventually displace the French.
One of the products the Dutch offered the Iroquois—and which the natives valued most—was not European goods but shells from the Atlantic coast used to make wampum, which served as the natives’ currency and the material foundation of their cultural memory. Something akin to the production of paper for books or chips for computers. At that time, money had a minimal and necessary degree of abstraction, so that two different things could be exchanged for the same value, but not to the radical degree of absolute abstraction that gold or silver had for Europeans—or finance today.
These rebellions, which coincided with others in South America, such as those of the Guaraní in the mid-18th century or the Charrúa a century later, spread successfully for a century, until their final defeat at the hands of the European superpowers, none of which were democratic but quite the opposite, both within and beyond their borders.
In response to European colonization and dispossession, the Iroquois quickly learned to use rifles and horses—though the latter were of little use to them in the resistance. They also learned about the European strategy of dividing their enemies, pitting the French and the English against one another in a new conflict of interests, but this time in the vast territory of Tortuga Island.
[1] Medical historiography, like almost any other, is deeply Eurocentric. The discoveries attributed to Europeans in the 19th century (“the dawn of scientific medicine”) were already known and practiced in the Islamic world a thousand years earlier—from concepts such as blood circulation, viruses, and repeated, documented clinical observation for comparison as a means of understanding human biology; to the proposal of a public health system and pharmacology as experimental solutions.
[2] Apart from medicine, the colonists who invaded Tortuga Island appropriated other material and intellectual treasures: the cultivation and processing of corn; the extraction and use of rubber; kayaks; snow masks; the construction technique for suspension bridges (in Peru, bridges spanned distances impossible for European technology); artificial islands for agriculture (Mesoamerica), etc.
[3] For serious research, we must read the valuable Jesuit chronicles (as with any other document or testimony referring to past events) through the lens of the authors’ ideology. In this case, we know that the Jesuits harbored deep prejudice against the Iroquois due to their resistance to accepting ideas such as hell, “the true faith,” and their attacks and resistance to colonization, which, for the Europeans, was not a crime but an altruistic sacrifice for the “savage nations.” Even though many records objectively describe their participatory forms of social life, this does not always mean that recognizing their democratic and egalitarian practices was a compliment at the time, as it might have been until recently. What we must try to do is apply a reverse lens to filter the facts from the exaggerations. We cannot fail to consider that, just as the forts of that time were the military bases of today, religious groups such as the Jesuits were, unconsciously, the equivalent of the Protestant missionaries promoted by the CIA in Africa and Latin America during the Cold War—and, likely, still are today.
[4] An interesting study published in *Quaternary Science Reviews* (“Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” 2019, pp. 13–36), using methods such as CO₂ variation, confirms anthropological and historical estimates: in the 17th century alone, 56 million Indigenous people died across the Americas. Other studies indicate that, as in the rest of the continent, more than 90 percent of the population of North America died as a result of colonization. From 1600 to 1900, the population fell from 10 million to half a million, which, when calculating cumulative deaths across generations, exceeds 15 million.
[5] See our work summarized in Pueblos: Outline for a Latin American Re-union. Humanus, 2024.
[6] Ohio is the name given by the Iroquois to that region, and it means ohi (beautiful) and yó (good).
[7] Iroquois architecture lacked the sophistication of Mesoamerican or Andean constructions. From an evolutionary standpoint, we could say that they simply had no need to fix something that worked perfectly for them: in an egalitarian society, monumental structures are rare. Judging a society’s progress by its material advancements is a sign of intellectual narrow-mindedness. From a historical perspective, it is also another modern absurdity. Judging the indigenous nations of the American continent by their tent villages from the centuries of colonization is like judging modern countries by their slums and shantytowns.
[8] The name “Neutrals” was given by the French to a part of the Huron-Wendat people, due to their neutrality in the conflicts during the early stages of the wars between Native nations and the Europeans.
[i] Joseph de Jouvancy. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 33: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. United States, FB&C Limited, 2015, p. 260.
[ii] Joseph de Jouvancy. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 33: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. United States, FB&C Limited, 2015, p. 212.
[iii] Joseph de Jouvancy. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 33: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. United States, FB&C Limited, 2015, p. 262.
[iv] Page, Jake. In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians. Tantor Free Press, 2024, 196–97.
[v] Bower, Bruce. “Incan Skull Surgery.” Science News, Apr. 25, 2008, sciencenews.org.
[vi] Borchers, Andrea T, et al. “Inflammation and Native American medicine: The role of Botanicals.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol. 72, no. 2, Aug. 2000, pp. 339–347.
[vii] “Native Americans’ Many Contributions to Medicine.” U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Italy, Nov. 18, 2021, it.usembassy.gov/native-americans-many-contributions-to-medicine/
[viii] Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. United Kingdom, Yale University Press, 2023, pp. 55–56.
[ix] Page, Jake. In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians. Tantor Free Press, 2024, p. 107.
[x] Nation Iroquoise: A Seventeenth-century Ethnography of the Iroquois. United Kingdom, University of Nebraska Press, 2003, p. 84.
[xi] Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. United Kingdom, Yale University Press, 2023, p. 75.
[xii] Jesuits. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 33: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. United States, FB&C Limited, 2015, pp. 102–104.
[xiii] Jesuits. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 33: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. United States, FB&C Limited, 2015, pp. 104–106.
[xiv] Nester, William R. The Struggle for Power in Colonial America, 1607–1776. United States, Lexington Books, 2017, p. 133.
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