Audiobook Review
Native Nation (2024)
by Kathleen DuVal
I like my history books like I like my coffee... magisterial. Native Nations won a Pulitzer Prize last year, which is why I looked up the Audiobook on the library app and checked it out. The Audiobook version clocks in at over 20 hours, and it look me a couple of check-outs and months of waiting in between to finish up, but it really is a great gloss on the history of the Native People in North America. DuVal's major scholarly achievement is blending part of the argument made David Graeber in The Dawn of Everything, where Graeber, drawing on other scholars, argued for the historical choices made by allegedly non historical peoples (pre contact Native Americans) and essentially postulated that the "contemporary" Native American political scene when the Europeans showed up was the result of a centuries old rebellion against the Cahokia regime in the area of modern day St. Louis, and a similar rebellion in a similar time frame against a different group. The idea is that the Native American who made contact with Europeans were not ignorant savages, but a collection of peoples who had rejected the kind of hierarchy and consolidation that won the day in the "old world" lands of Europe and Asia.
Graeber offers this analysis mostly as a theory, but DuVal fills in that gap with actual chapters from actual Native American history- she goes all over the map, with particular highlights coming from the Southeast and Southwest. If you read Graeber, and are looking to follow up his Native American supported arguments, this Pulitzer Prize winning history book is worth reading.
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1 comment:
Re: "The Dawn of Everything"
Unfortunately, that book lacks credibility and depth.
In fact "The Dawn of Everything" is a biased disingenuous account of human history (https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity & https://offshootjournal.org/untenable-history/) that spreads fake hope (the authors of "The Dawn" claim human history has not "progressed" in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system... so there's hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book's dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavour geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history since the dawn of agriculture has "progressed" in a linear stage (the "stuck" problem, see below), although not before that (https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This "progress" has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html) which the fake hope-giving authors of "The Dawn" entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding and acknowledging the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we've been "stuck" in a destructive hierarchy and unequal 2-class system , and will be far into the foreseeable future (the "stuck" question --- "the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?" or "how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles" --- [cited from their book] is the major question in "The Dawn" its authors never really answer, predictably).
Worse than that, the Dawn authors actually promote, push, propagandize, and rationalize in that book the unjust immoral exploitive criminal 2-class system that's been predominant for millennia [https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/was-david-graeber-offered-a-deal]!
One of the "expert" authors, Graeber, has no real idea on what world we've been living in and about the nature of humans revealed by his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn't know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they've been wanting that for thousands of years (and that's not the only ignorant notion in that title) --- see https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
"The Dawn" is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked "science," served lucratively to the gullible ignorant public who craves myths and fairy tales.
“Far too many worry about possibilities more than understanding reality.” --- E.J. Doyle, American songwriter & social critic, 2021
"The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” ... just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm." --- Unknown
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