The First Philosophes: The Impact of Indigenous Thought upon Christianity and Modernity

Abstract

Abstract: Intended as a wide-ranging "thought piece" and as a precis of a monograph-in-progress, this article argues that although Indigenous peoples are often seen as vanquished victims, this standard historiographic (and popular) portrayal overlooks the profundity and scope of their conceptual contributions to modernity. The Indigenous peoples of early modern North America did more than simply influence those Europeans who settled among them. They also exported—through the writings of the explorers, colonists, and missionaries who encountered them—ways of thinking and being in the world that profoundly engaged the imaginations and influenced the ideas of French philosophes. These valuable contributions have been overlooked, however, due to a range of insalubrious developments in the nineteenth century: from the new definition of Indigenous people as racial inferiors to the dismissal of Indigenous motifs in Enlightenment thought as distorted and largely fictitious. Given that we are experiencing in our own times a new wave of Indigenous influence, the time has come for a thorough reassessment of Native American contributions to modern Western thought.