“Rousseau has been accused of many crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the ‘noble savage’, which he didn’t really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the ‘myth of the stupid savage’ even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity. Nineteenth-century imperialists adopted the stereotype enthusiastically, merely adding on a variety of ostensibly scientific justifications - from Darwinian evolutionism to ‘scientific’ racism - to elaborate on that notion of innocent simplicity, and thus provide a pretext for pushing the remaining free peoples of the world (or increasingly, as European imperial expansion continued, the formerly free peoples) into a conceptual space where their judgements no longer seemed threatening. This is the work we are trying to undo.”

Graeber/Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

As an indigenous person I wholeheartedly reject the cartoonish noble savage trope, which, ironically, Europeans came up with and peddled, not indigenous peoples. When I speak of my culture’s lack of wars, armies, kings, or any viable form of social subordination whatsoever, or the fact that they were among the world’s first copper workers, or the fact that they created a successful large scale agricultural society in a farming-averse ecology without markets or states, I’m describing a highly complex world created and managed by highly intelligent people. I speak of the success, wisdom, and hard work of many generations. We’re fully aware that the freedom our ancestors enjoyed wasn’t the product of living like mindless animals in some imaginary state of nature. Our ancestors designed their societies the way they did precisely because they knew that every society is subject to countless imperfect human behaviors and tendencies, and they succeeded in preempting many of them.

Nobody’s saying there wasn’t violence, betrayal, attempts at coercive control, or moral depravity, though even early European visitors familiar with Algonquian peoples routinely noted how these things were far more scarce in those societies than anything they’d seen elsewhere. And yes, we know that the Americas were full of diverse cultures on a scale that non-indigenous minds can hardly imagine today, so there’s no pretending that they were all the same, especially when the ethnographic record shows us all that they were wildly different.

Not savages, not noble, just human. Pretty sure that’s all we ever wanted to be seen as.