Indigenous Peoples as the founders of Anarchism
It occurred to me that (partially because it’s National Indigenous History Month —in specifically Canada and not the US I just learned XD, but also because of the rise in Anarchism in recent events)
A lot of people (particularly white people) might not realize that awareness of Native American peoples’ social structures was largely what inspired and bolstered the rise of Anarchism as an ideology in the Enlightenment era.
Both in giving concrete ideas directly (like Gift Economies) and in giving strength due to the fact that native peoples had been doing it undeniably successfully for thousands of years, Native American people are directly responsible for and probably were indispensable in the rise of Anarchism as we know it today!
So, anarchists, not only don’t forget to pay respect to Native peoples due to the fact that they’re people XD, but also because they’re our founders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anarchism#Precursors
In the New World, the first to use the term "anarchy" to mean something other than chaos was Louis-Armand, Baron de Lahontan in his Nouveaux voyages dans l'Amérique septentrionale, 1703 (New Voyages in Northern America). He described indigenous American society as having no state, laws, prisons, priests or private property as being in anarchy.[34]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin
Kropotkin's observations of cooperative tendencies in indigenous peoples (pre-feudal, feudal, and those remaining in modern societies) led him to conclude that not all human societies were based on competition as were those of industrialized Europe, and that many societies exhibited cooperation among individuals and groups as the norm. He also concluded that most pre-industrial and pre-authoritarian societies (where he claimed that leadership, central government, and class did not exist) actively defend against the accumulation of private property by, for example, equally distributing within the community a person's possessions when they died, or by not allowing a gift to be sold, bartered or used to create wealth (see Gift economy).[58]
(although the articles could stand to point this out more clearly so I don’t have to X’D )