Sitting in my cozy kitchen with the sun streaming in, I find myself torn up by the terrible state of our world and the unconscionable brutality of the wars raging before our eyes. I feel so grateful for the privileges I enjoy here in relative peace and safety. I find comfort in remembering some of the inspiring political leaders of yesterday.
Kandiaronk comes to mind.
I was introduced to him by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow in their grand 2021 narrative, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. They remind me how social movements have effectively informed and sometimes changed our civic lives during my lifetime.
Permission to travel to the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was my parents’ birthday present to me. I turned 15 on the road. Five of us, all friends from the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Brewster, squeezed into a VW bug. At the rally, my sister, then in college, and I stood up front as our heroes — Pete Seeger, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Marian Anderson — sang to us. We listened as Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Dream” speech, mingling with friendly strangers in the hot sun. Later we saw legislation that addressed voting rights and civil rights enacted by Congress and signed by President Lyndon Johnson.
The experiences of our soldiers on the ground in Vietnam, in another example, informed policy when many of them came home and joined the antiwar movement. After way too much suffering and loss of life, the Vietnam War ended.
The Occupy protests of 2011 brought attention to the dire wealth inequities in the global economic system and spread to more than 950 cities around the world. They preceded Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2015-2016, which electrified many by speaking truth to power — a phrase originated by 1963 March organizer Bayard Rustin.
Sanders — and before him, Dennis Kucinich, Jessie Jackson, and Shirley Chisholm — brought a coherent understanding of the role government must play in serving our collective best interests and how to live together for the greater good. Each echoed the words of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address: beware the military-industrial complex.
Looking back further for examples of American leadership, I arrived at Kandiaronk (c. 1649-1701). He was a sage, a Wendat-Iroquois philosopher and statesman. The Wendat Confederacy was a coalition of four Iroquois-speaking peoples. Kandiaronk was recognized as a leading intellectual, strategist, and debater who engaged the French Jesuit missionaries in North America. Those debates were written down, published, and read by European elites.
Authors Graeber and Wengrow offer Kandiaronk (also spelled “Kondiaronk”) as an example suggesting that some humans have done well at living together in large, urban-like groupings over thousands of years built on social interdependence. They describe his view of European law: that it was not necessitated by any inherent corruptness in human nature but rather by a form of social organization that encourages “selfish and acquisitive behavior.”
“For my own part I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you are,” Kandiaronk told the Jesuits. “What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?
“I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society,” he continued, “and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine.’ … What you call money is the devil of devils … the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living.”
The anger that many people feel today is being effectively exploited because “divide and conquer” works well in our unregulated media moment and as inequities in access to resources become more obvious.
With each new report from the Middle East, Sudan, and Ukraine, I am choosing to align with those working to promote humane values: community healing no matter how deep the trauma, justice, peace, and respect for each other and the natural world. Fortunately, we are surrounded by many such species of creature here on the Outer Cape.
