Please watch Will and Harper. It’s the best piece of anything cinema I’ve seen in years. It definitely beats all of these terrible horror movies, Oh my god I love horror movies and I seek them out this time of year and 99.98% of them are just awful. Oh, I’m sorry, Will and Harper. It’s beautiful, see it immediately. It’s a tale of love and understanding and saying yes I can to being your true self when the world is telling you no you can’t.
But it also reminds me of something I’ve come to learn from all of my reading about North American societies and cultures from before the occupation. In many ways, Europeans coming to the Americas after tens of thousands of years of separation is a case study of what humanity may have been like everywhere before the notions of patriarchy and gender and later race germinated in North Africa and then really flourished in Europe.
On a quick side note, most people believe that humans came to the Americas across the Bering land bridge about 10,000 years ago, but we keep finding older and older signs of migrations dating back to as early as 40,000 years. There were likely many migrations to the Americas. I geek out on this stuff.
In any case, when the Europeans arrived some of the most detailed first-hand accounts are from the Catholic missionaries. Everyone else was too busy being conquistadors to write as much down. The missionaries on the other hand were on fact-finding missions. The original Papal Bull — in what we call the Doctrine of Discovery — stated that any land could be taken if it wasn’t occupied by Christians. And any people inhabiting those lands could be enslaved or dominated or just pushed aside so that the land could be occupied and exploited by Christian nations. Pope Francis issued the first repudiation to these Papal Bulls in March of 2023, not kidding, they just got around to it last year. Well anyway, after a few decades, the Church determined it would be better to convert the population rather than just kill them outright, you could still take the land, but try to convert who you can. They probably switched to that because they were getting their asses kicked a lot. Okay, great, but what does this have to do with Will and Harper you might ask? I’m getting to it, hold on.
So it was up to the missionaries to report back to the brass back in Rome what was going on with these people over in the Americas. North America during the beginning of the occupation had thousands of different cultures, languages, belief systems and types of governments. Ranging from small interconnected groups to something as big as the Haudanashonee where the population was in the tens of thousands. The Haudenosaunee, the people we commonly refer to as the Iroquois, were the first group Europeans made a treaty with, and later both the Colonies and the Brits asked them for help during the War of Independence. They said no to both groups and sat it out — in case you’re wondering. Wow, that’s interesting, but what about Will and Harper? Right, sorry, I could go on and on, but this is why I’m talking about it.
The missionaries sent back report after report about how societies were structured. Like I said there were thousands of different cultures so it’s hard to say what everyone was doing but there were identified trends. And some of those trends were a lack of Patriarchy and different views of gender roles. See, I’m back to Will and Harper. As the missionaries put it, men were living as women and women were living as men and no one seemed to think twice about it. And that was very threatening to the missionaries and the people they reported back to. The entire European worldview was based upon these notions. Upending them could unravel the tapestry of society itself. This became a big part of the mythology that was developed to portray the people inhabiting North America (all of the Americas) as heathens and savages. Of course, who’s really the savage in this scenario? The people just going about their lives or those who decided it was their god-given right to take those people’s land by force?
So what I’ve taken from these accounts is that Patriarchy and our concepts surrounding gender roles are not inherent human behavior. I mean that should be obvious but we are surrounded by people who think otherwise. I think that some people think that it was natural for prehistoric men to club women over the head and drag them back to their caves, and probably even think that’s how it should be done today. Well, it wasn’t the case, Patriarchy, and male dominance over societies are not some natural state of Homo Sapiens. What Europeans learned from conquering the Americas was that men and women here were often in societies where they shared power. That people were free to live their lives without the same strict gender constraints that somewhere down the line humanity chained itself to.
So when I watched Will and Harper I didn’t see us evolving into a more free society, I saw a glimpse of how it can be once we rid ourselves of these destructive notions that have plagued humanity for thousands of years. The first thing that the Europeans tried to do was cover up the reality of what life was like in the Americas and ever since then the patriarchal system has been trying to erase that history. Will and Harper is just one tiny vignette of how destructive these ideas have been for billions of people over the centuries. And what we are seeing now is people recognizing this and attempting to finally move past these ideas and the inevitable backlash.
Because, of course, abandoning these notions is still very threatening to most of the world. After all, we’ve been steeped in these concepts for thousands of years. And these ideas spread easily. Ideas of Patriarchy and gender spread through the native societies in the Americas like wildfire. But it also works in the other direction. In The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow — you might know Wengrow from his involvement in Occupy Wall Street — they make some compelling and well-documented claims. Namely that ideas about freedom and how societies can be structured were making their way back to the European population as well. Besides missionaries, other writers were also interacting with First Nation Americans, and some of these Americans were learning European languages and passing ideas along as well. Including concepts that went against class structure, notions about how to self-govern and what the meaning of freedom is.
We like to think that Democracy sprung out of Greece and Rome and the Enlightenment. Well, the Enlightenment also coincides with the discovery and occupation of the Americas and Graeber and Wengrow make a pretty strong case that American societies of the time influenced Europe more than European historians wanted to tell us. Oren Lyons, Haudenosaunee Faithkeeper and influential member of the Red Power Movement and Lacrosse advocate — he’s an accomplished Lacrosse player which is a sport derived from First Nation societies of the Americas — has been explaining the influence that his culture had on the colonies for most of his career. As he says, the Founding Fathers were influenced by the Haudenosaunee’s form of government, which was essentially a nonpatriarchal self-governing body. Something akin to a Democracy, probably much more so than anything going on in Europe at the time. Jefferson and Franklin were especially interested in what they were doing and Franklin met with them many times, he even advocated for adopting some of their governing concepts in the colonies well before the Declaration of Independence was written.
So the First Nation societies in America not only introduced notions of personal freedoms that threatened European society they also had concepts of self-governance that British-American men of the time wanted to adopt. With some caveats, of course. They weren’t going to allow power-sharing with women and they weren’t going to abandon notions of race and gender and Patriarchy.
But the arc of history is long and while Europe completed its occupation of the Americas, and did its best to stamp out the ideas of the original inhabitants, while still co-opting the parts it liked in its fashion, the ideas haven’t died. Because they’re old. Older than Patriarchy. Currently, there are movements everywhere among many First Nation peoples to reclaim life before occupation. And European descendants are seeing more and more that it doesn’t have to be like this. We can have a society where someone like Harper doesn’t have to hide her true self for most of her life just to survive. It existed way back in the recesses of humanity’s history, or I think so anyway. And there is proof of it.
I think that what we are seeing now is a dying set of beliefs lashing out and I’m hoping that sooner rather than later we can finally shed these oppressive notions and get back to a time with more freedom for everybody to live their lives as they choose.