About Tutelo-Saponi Language

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There are those who believe that the French Englightenment began when the French first visited the Indians of the Americas and witnessed a level of personal liberty unknown in Europe. Have you ever heard this?

It is pretty well documented that the American Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Payne all studied the Indian democracies they found here when they were designing our governmental system.

There is also some talk that the French just happened to start discussing the rights of man after contact with the American Indians. When the first people talking about it are traced down, that influence can be seen.

Besides giving the world 65% of its present food crops, the Indians of the Americas also profoundly contributed to world political philosophy.

Nonetheless, you still hear people refer to them as “primitive hunter/gatherer savages.”

hi, it was very interesting to here about all these tribes in europe!i here there are many tribes in germany,sweden,holland,norway,and now france.i have heard much about the europeans who went back home with a native wife or slave,or a native/black wife or slave which produced many native lines.also heard they all know there genealogy a little better than most of us.can any one explain this phenom?we need a euronative expert to give us the down load!!

Here is the passage in Jack Weatherford’s “Indian Givers” where he attributes the French Enlightenment and its fascination with concepts of liberty (which led to the French Revolution) to French exposure to Indian values and political systems.

After the appearance of Lahontan’s “New Voyages to North America” in 1703 in The Hague and his “Curious Dialogues” soon thereafter, Lahontan became an international celebrity feted in all the liberal circles. The playwright Delisle de la Drevetiere adapted these ideas to the stage in a play about an American Indian’s visit to Paris. Performed in Paris in 1721 as “Arlequin Sauvage,” the play ends with a young Parisian woman named Violette falling in love with the Indian and fleeing with him to live in the liberty of America beyond law and money.

As usually happens in the theatrical world, this success initiated dozens of imitations, and there soon followed a spate of plays, farces, burlesques, and operas on the wonderful life of liberty among the Indians of America. Impressarios brought over Indians in droves to tour the European capitals and entertain at parties with their tales of liberty and freedom in the American paradise. Plays such a “Indes Galantes” and “Le Nouveau Monde” follow in the 1730s. The original play “Arlequin Sauvage” had a major impact on a young man named Jean Jacques Rousseau, who set about in 1742 to write an operetta on the discovery of the New World featuring Christopher Columbus’s arrival with a sword while singing to the Indians the refrain “Lose your liberty!” This contrast between the liberty of the Indians and the virtual enslavement of the Europeans became a lifelong concern for Rousseau and eventually led to publication of his best-known work, “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” in 1754.

I’ve found this play at http://www.site-magister.com/arleqsauv.htm and various other sites. Google will translate the first few pages. If I broke it into chunks we could get a rough translation, but I’ll leave that for now.

I’m definetely going to get ahold of a translation of Lahonton. They’ve got it on microform in Greenville. He wrote about the Canadian Hurons in the 1600’s. I definitely want to see that.

That’s odd. I wonder why non-Aryans would have interested him so much. Seems out of character.