The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

from the nation.com by David Graeber and David Wengrow, review by Daniel Immerwahr

Protest speaks a language of forceful insistence. “Defund the police,” “Build the wall”—the unyielding demands go back to Moses’ “Let my people go.” So it was curious when the July 2011 issue of the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters ran a cryptic call to arms: a ballerina posing atop the famous Charging Bull statue on Wall Street, with the question “What is our one demand?” printed above her in red. The question wasn’t answered; readers were only told, “#OccupyWallStreet. September 17th. Bring tent.”

In retrospect, it’s astonishing that such a vague entreaty worked, especially since Adbusters declined to organize the action. After issuing the call, the magazine had “almost nothing to do with it,” its cofounder admitted. Instead, an unaffiliated group called New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, composed largely of socialists, announced a planning meeting the next month at Bowling Green in Manhattan’s financial district. The meeting was tacked on to a protest the group had organized against Republican attempts to enforce the federal debt ceiling and gut social services.

“They were going to make speeches, and then we were going to march under waving banners,” said the anarchist David Graeber, who attended the meeting. “Who fucking cares?” Graeber and some like-minded thinkers defected to the other side of the park, sat in a circle, and discussed less hierarchical possibilities. “We quickly determined we had no idea what we were actually going to do,” he recalled. And yet it was this freewheeling collection of anarchists, Zapatistas, and squatters that formed the organizational seed of Occupy Wall Street, an explosive movement that held Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan for two months, made headlines, and set off more than 200 occupations globally.

What was the occupiers’ one demand? They never said. And as they practiced a leaderless form of democracy, there was no one to say. The movement did have a slogan, “We Are the 99 Percent,” informed by recent economics research exposing the gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else. Yet the occupiers didn’t seem particularly inspired by the technical solutions that economists proposed. When Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank’s former chief economist and a critic of unregulated capitalism, came to Zuccotti Park to complain about how financial markets had “misallocated capital,” he looked adorably out of place in his collared dress shirt and khakis, surrounded by activists in kaffiyehs, baseball caps, and hoodies.

Journalists trying to understand this inchoate insurgency turned for answers to Graeber, a seasoned veteran of the global justice movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s and a central figure in Zuccotti Park. It helped that he was a witty commentator with a knack for summing things up crisply. He’d been the one to suggest the language of “the 99 percent,” which he’d adapted from an article by Stiglitz. Graeber was also, as some of his fellow occupiers were surprised to learn, a major anthropological theorist. Starting as an expert on highland Madagascar, Graeber had become a free-range thinker specializing in questions of hierarchy and value but interested in virtually everything. He’d recently written a 600-page ethnography of the protests against neoliberal globalization—protests he’d joined himself.

Graeber’s academic career had faltered when he was denied tenure at Yale and was effectively locked out of the US academy (he suspected that his politics were the problem). But he’d found a new position in London, and his fifth book, the hefty Debt: The First 5,000 Years, had come out to significant buzz just months before Occupy Wall Street began. Its sweeping attack on the economic assumptions behind austerity politics seemed to fit the moment perfectly.

And it truly was a moment. Occupy Wall Street, Spain’s Indignados movement, and the Arab Spring all erupted in 2011, sending shock waves around the planet. Occupations took place from Oslo to Tel Aviv. It seemed briefly as if the foundations of our corporate-led order might crack—and, in a way, they did. In the United States, the language of “the 99 percent” is now commonplace, and Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were all arguably propelled to their high perches within Democratic politics by the protests of 2011.

Yet these are socialist-style successes. What of the protest’s anarchist origins and principles—its governance by general assembly, working groups, and “spokes councils”? Occupy was more than a plea for financial regulation; it was also a stunning display of how much hell utopians sleeping in tents could raise. For Graeber, those utopians’ nonhierarchical forms of organization, not their indistinct demands, were what really mattered. Most people, he wrote, “have been taught since a very young age to have extremely limited political horizons, an extremely narrow sense of human possibility.” Their idea of democracy is limited to voters electing rulers, and they struggle to imagine free people collectively managing their own affairs. Zuccotti Park’s leaderless decision-making showed what that might look like.

Another way to show that, Graeber believed, was for anthropologists to document societies that have gotten by without structures of domination. And so, for more than a decade, he worked with the archaeologist David Wengrow on another book, focused on early non-state societies. What began as “a diversion” for the authors became an epic, the 700-page first installment of a tetralogy that would “easily outsell The Lord of the Rings,” Graeber playfully predicted. Wider in scope than even Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the projected series was to be a grand retelling of the history of our species.

But it was a story that Graeber would never fully tell. On August 6, 2020, at 9:18 pm, he declared the first volume finished. Less than a month later, on September 2, he died suddenly of necrotic pancreatitis in Venice. Wengrow carried the book to publication, just in time for Occupy Wall Street’s 10th anniversary. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a work of dizzying ambition, one that seeks to rescue stateless societies from the condescension with which they’re usually treated. Yet it succeeds better in uprooting conventional wisdom than in laying down a narrative of its own. The result is a book that is both thrilling and exasperating, showcasing the promise and the perils of the anarchist approach to history.

History, as a field, is often inhospitable to anarchists; its usual fare—kings, battles, and Nazis—doesn’t offer them much to work with. But push further back, into the eras we know about from archaeological digs, and things perk up. Many early societies, Graeber and Wengrow note, lacked states as we would recognize them.

Why didn’t early humans construct durable hierarchies? The conventional and oft-repeated wisdom is that they simply lacked the capacity. Life then was a primordial soup of politics, a sea of anarchy. “Civilization” evolved only in time, the first halting steps taken by the handful of societies that managed to spawn cities, mint coins, and erect temples. These early coalescences of order, we tell ourselves, are the success stories.

Sympathy for civilization is baked into our terminology. For example, we divide ancient Egypt into golden and dark ages: the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, when the pyramids were built, and the First, Second, and Third Intermediate Periods, unfortunate eras of disarray. But should we really think about them that way? Graeber and Wengrow point out that the Middle Kingdom’s vaunted “strong and stable government” rested on “crippling taxation, state-sponsored suppression of ethnic minorities, and the growth of forced labour to support royal mining expeditions and construction projects—not to mention the brutal plundering of Egypt’s southern neighbours for slaves and gold.” However impressive the Middle Kingdom’s pyramids were, most people, preferring not to be military conscripts or slaves, would surely rather have lived in the Second Intermediate Period. So why do we take large monuments as the measure of a society’s achievement? Shouldn’t we rather take them as evidence of something having gone horribly awry?

In our obsession with order, the authors contend, we write off most prehistoric and ancient peoples as essentially children. We treat their lack of strong states as a failure, so that vast spans of humanity’s time line appear to be populated by dim-witted ancestors who couldn’t figure out how to establish cities, plant grain, or build tombs for their rulers. What we rarely consider is that they might have chosen to fashion their societies as they did—that they might have contemplated creating states and thought better of it.

Our forebears crafted their societies intentionally and intelligently: This is the fundamental, electrifying insight of The Dawn of Everything. It’s a book that refuses to dismiss long-ago peoples as corks floating on the waves of prehistory. Instead, it treats them as reflective political thinkers from whom we might learn something.

Graeber and Wengrow are thus keenly interested in the institutions that these ancient peoples created. Humanity before agriculture, they argue, was not an endless file of primitive egalitarian bands but a “carnival parade” of “bold social experiments”: cities without rulers, fishing societies with slaves, foragers with long-distance social coordination.

Our ancestors were inventive, Graeber and Wengrow insist, because they had options. Without territorial states hemming them in, they could slide in and out of social configurations more easily. They might visit a neighboring society that arranged its affairs differently. Or they might, like the Cheyenne and Lakota, enjoy a seasonal rotation: a strong central government during the buffalo hunt, then a dispersal into small autonomous bands when it ended.

Today, social arrangements are pretty much the same everywhere, but premodern people sampled from a wide menu. Surely, Graeber and Wengrow argue, this must have made them political connoisseurs, with a keen sense of all the possibilities beyond inequalities, armies, and kings.

So why did the parade end? How did a crazy quilt of social possibility become the wall-to-wall carpeting of stratified states? The usual answer is that states are evolutionarily dominant, that there’s something natural or at least inevitable about them. Give people enough time, goes the theory, and they’ll form durable hierarchies, because states are the big-boy pants of politics. The Dawn of Everything rejects that view and instead offers hundreds of pages of people thoughtfully avoiding states, subverting them, or replacing them with alternatives.

Still, the ubiquity of hierarchical states today is the challenge that any anarchist history must confront. It resembles the challenge that Karl Marx’s theory once faced: If capitalism is supposed to collapse under the weight of its contradictions, then why isn’t the whole world communist by now? There was a generation or two of Marxist writers who, tasked with answering that question, hacked through the thicket of modern history. “Ah, Poland,” they would exclaim. “The problem there was Dmowski’s nationalist movement, an ultimately bourgeois formation that misdirected working-class political energies.” In a way, the inaccuracy of Marx’s central prediction proved extraordinarily generative. It forced Marxists to theorize incessantly; they needed a take on everything.

The Dawn of Everything has a similar feel. Confronting the statist theory that durable hierarchies are inevitable, Graeber and Wengrow cede no ground and fight at every corner. They care—a lot—about whether the ancient town of Çatalhöyük sourced its crops from dry land or riverbeds. (“The distinction is important for a variety of reasons, not just ecological but also historical, even political.”) They care, too, whether the palace at Taosi in 2000 bce was razed in an imperial reshuffling or a revolt. Does the difficulty we have reading graven images from the Chavín de Huántar site in Peru prove that it wasn’t an “actual empire”? Graeber and Wengrow have views.

This relentless revisionism can be exhilarating, but it’s also exhausting. Consider the pre-Aztec city of Teotihuacan in modern-day Mexico. It is an immense site with pyramids, but its pictorial art is short on recognizable rulers. Does that mean it “had found a way to govern itself without overlords,” as Graeber and Wengrow posit? Perhaps, but there are images of Teotihuacano lords at the Mayan site of Tikal. Cue a four-page section in which Graeber and Wengrow argue that the lords depicted weren’t true royals but “unscrupulous foreigners” who’d arrived in Tikal claiming ranks they’d never attained—a sort of ancient Mesoamerican stolen valor.

The readers of Graeber’s previous work will recognize this provocative style; he was a wildly creative thinker who excelled at subverting received wisdom. But he was better known for being interesting than right, and he would gleefully make pronouncements that either couldn’t be confirmed (the Iraq War was retribution for Saddam Hussein’s insistence that Iraqi oil exports be paid for in euros) or were never meant to be (“White-collar workers don’t actually do anything”).

In The Dawn of Everything, this interpretative brashness feeds off our lack of firm knowledge about the distant past. When only potsherds remain, conjecture can run wild. Graeber and Wengrow dutifully acknowledge the need for caution, but this doesn’t stop them from dismissing rival theories with assurance. It’s hard not to wonder whether this book, which zips merrily across time and space and hypothesizes confidently in the face of scant or confusing evidence, can be trusted.

Certainly, the part closest to my area of expertise raises questions. In arguing that people hate hierarchies, Graeber and Wengrow twice assert that settlers in the colonial Americas who’d been “captured or adopted” by Indigenous societies “almost invariably” chose to stay with them. By contrast, Indigenous people taken into European societies “almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or—having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed—returning to indigenous society to live out their last days.”

Big if true, as they say, but the claim is ballistically false, and the sole scholarly authority that Graeber and Wengrow cite—a 1977 dissertation—actually argues the opposite. “Persons of all races and cultural backgrounds reacted to captivity in much the same way” is its thesis; generally, young children assimilated into their new culture and older captives didn’t. Many captured settlers returned, including the frontiersman Daniel Boone, the Puritan minister John Williams, and the author Mary Rowlandson. And there’s a long history of Native people attending settler schools, befriending or marrying whites, and adopting European religious practices. Such choices were surely shaped by colonialism, but to deny they were ever made is absurd.

Perhaps this misstep doesn’t matter. Graeber and Wengrow can indulge in outsize claims and pet theories because they don’t need to always be right. The Dawn of Everything aims to shoot holes in the myth of the inevitable state, to deflate the notion that advanced societies can’t function without leaders, police, or bureaucrats. The 700-page book is a hail of bullets; if only some hit the target, that’s enough.

Statists believe that overarching hierarchies are both natural and desirable. Graeber and Wengrow energetically attack that position, but the big question still looms: If states aren’t inevitable, why are they everywhere? This question becomes even more of a stumper if, like the authors, you attribute a great deal of agency to non-state peoples. The more thoughtful and capable you take them to be, the harder it becomes to explain how they all came to live in the sorts of societies they ostensibly wouldn’t have chosen.

Two popular history-of-everything writers, Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari, have an answer. The sequence of farming, private property, war, and states was a trap, they write. Humans entered it without realizing they wouldn’t be able to leave, and for most of history, all they found was despotism and disease. The agricultural revolution was thus “the worst mistake in the history of the human race,” as Diamond asserts, or “history’s biggest fraud,” as Harari does.

Graeber and Wengrow recoil at this explanation. Were our ancestors truly doltish enough to tumble, one after another, into the same trap? More important, they’re wary of Diamond’s and Harari’s fatalism, of the suggestion that State Street runs only one way. In Graeber and Wengrow’s rendition, agriculture was, like everything else, a considered and revocable choice. The Dawn of Everything thus tells of people “flirting and tinkering with the possibilities of farming”—taking it up, putting it down—without thereby “enslaving themselves.”

Yet somewhere, something did go “terribly wrong,” Graeber and Wengrow admit. People went from creatively experimenting with kings and farms to getting “stuck” with them. That metaphor—being stuck in states rather than evolving to them—is useful, in that it suggests people might get unstuck. It captures Graeber and Wengrow’s sense that there is no natural progression from leaderless bands to sophisticated hierarchies.

So, again, how did states take over? What’s exasperating about The Dawn of Everything is that it never really answers the question; at most, it offers quick hints and hypotheses. The loss of physical mobility seems important—people’s inability to leave societies they dislike. So does the tendency of bureaucracies to become impersonal and uncaring. Still, blaming durable hierarchies, as Graeber and Wengrow do, on “a confluence of violence and maths” does not settle the issue.

Perhaps the two were leaving this for a later volume, but it’s not clear that they want to give an answer. To do so would be to offer a grand historical narrative, to explain—as Diamond and Harari do—how humanity moved permanently from one thing to another. Yet Graeber and Wengrow seem almost allergic to the idea that there’s any natural sequence in social arrangements. There’s “simply no reason,” they write, to believe that societies require more leadership or bureaucracy as they grow.

The effects of that contention on their narrative are profound. Once you’ve thrown out the notion that there’s some law or pattern governing the development of societies, it becomes hard to tell any overarching story. The Dawn of Everything is thus less a biography of the species than a scrapbook, filled with accounts of different societies doing different things. That is very much on purpose; for Graeber and Wengrow, early history doesn’t march from A to B but instead wanders like a Ouija pointer all over the alphabet.

So are our wandering days over? Not according to Graeber and Wengrow: They believe we can still wriggle free from states. There’s something embarrassing, they acknowledge, in the thought that we could have been living differently this whole time, and thus that “enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labour never had to happen.” Yet their upbeat conclusion is that “even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.”

This is anarchism’s heady promise: Break people out of their stupor, show them the alternatives, and they’ll take the hint. You occupy the park not to push for policies (what was their one demand?) but as proof of concept, to demonstrate what a society free of domination looks like.

Similarly, an anarchist history, at least in Graeber and Wengrow’s hands, isn’t the story of change over time but a high-spirited tour of political diversity. It’s a chance to lay out the options, with little sense that population growth or new technologies have pushed any of them permanently off the table. Humans lived without states before, thus they can do so again. Because, ultimately, the point isn’t what happened, but rather all the possibilities that remain.

Daniel Immerwahr is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University. He is the author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development and How to Hide an Empire.

There are 30 Comments

is how to do a book review. It tells about the book enough, with agreements and criticism, such that now i am curious enough to want to read it.

One thing i didn't see mentioned, about why today most humans live under states, is population. When there were a lot fewer people they could leave areas of harsh control for areas without hierarchies or proto-states. We have no such escape routes today because most of the good land is already controlled by other humans.

Maybe Graeber & Wengrow were going to get to this, but one thing not mentioned here, about why we have mostly states now, is psychological trauma. It's one thing to get fed up with Thag lording it over you so you head out for space where Thag can't get at you, and quite another where Thag & company not only chase you away but destroy the land on which you rely. Humans and land are not wholly separate things. From a certain angle they make one entity. The abuse of power that figured out demoralizing and infantilizing people could be achieved by destruction of their land base is, imo, why we are in the mess we are in.

Anyway, it sucks Graeber died.

So you're saying the original individual is the basis of the State form ?? Curious.

yeah, aka the sovereign. the monarch. the self, deified.

ain't you ever tried cocaine or meth? we all have a homicidal tyrant buried in our psyches somewhere

Yeah, no, I got that. This site is full of individualists, just pointing out the obvious.

Seriously though, that is the ethical choice we have; to give rein to the tyrant within or to come to terms with it and find other uses for that energy.

exactly! and you're right, @news has far too many shitty representations of the individualist, which is why I usually end up arguing in the other direction ...

Tho I am warming to the rugged hobo-individualism you project throughout this entire site :)

if you could talk about a wider range of things on here, haha. I thought the conversation was funnier when the part about me talking about my drug experiences was in here, it was a true bonding moment with lumpen for sure.

If you purchase my " The Hobo Manifesto of a Rugged Pioneering Individualist" for 49 dollars you will read on page 586, paragraph 5 that I have banned the use of recreational drugs, just letting you know.

Hilarious. Now this reads like a comedy routine gone wonky. A drug to me is moderating meaning out of threads. Mmm, good to the last drop.

All monarchies in history were based on lineage, i.e. hereditary power based on the pretense of a ruling class more apt for being in charge. There's no instance of a monarch that wasn't put into power by any sort of social institution of subjection to a royal bloodline, and in itself the principle of "blue blood" defines a group with special attributes.

Ergo no, not individual power.

An individualist would be one who asserts themselves regardless of the power structures they're into, with or without their legitimate social support (the moral order). And that, my friend, have failed at this basic anarchistic princple.

ha! cool, you're being a dick so I don't have to be nice to you either!

just use your reason for the origin of the "divine right", unless you're a creationist, it must have started somewhere, right?!
haha you're so bad at this. this is like, one of the main points of anarchist thought, not getting taken in by authoritarian worldviews

it had to start somewhere, right? "there's no instance of a monarch that wasn't put in to power" HAHAHA you fukin fool!

bet you think rich people worked hard for their money too! what a CHUMP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uSeuYyPDBQ

" hereditary power based on the pretense of a ruling class more apt for being in charge"

That's all what this "divine right" is about. A group of people took power, and instituted a leader for them, and they'll defend their blood line like capitalists now are defending property. Coz you know... that's where this pattern came from, in the first place.

The arbitrary nature of monarchy has nothing to do the self, neither is personal sovereignty has to do with being a sovereign. You're just confusing water with wine, you wino.

oh, so you don't see the connection. that's what your confused assertion reveals here^

you could always be curious instead a pompous prick about it but I won't hold my breath

What an absurd connection, confusing use of the word "sovereign" because from subliminal indoctrination you have conflated its overuse by monarchies and States to consolidate their own "rights" for unrestrained power with the entirely different concept of being in opposition to the -State- and having individual sovereignty. Stirner woud be rolling in his grve if this was conflation was left unchallenged.

Anon 18:30 makes a good point about the word ---sovereign--- and how it has come to be associated ONLY with the false idea of the Crown and State having an indisputable inherent right to exist from historical cultural narratives being taught and broadly accepted as true.

more of the same, just cuz you fools haven't thought this shit through, doesn't obligate me to draw you a map

but the links between personal sovereignty and accumulation of power in the ancient world should be more obvious if your analysis of power isn't severely stunted in some way. i can only guess what's going wrong in your reasoning and you're not curious about what's being said, just scoffing so ... why should I waste too much of my time?

"that's ABSURD! what could personal sovereignty have to do with leviathan?!"

that's ... the entire point of constructing the leviathan in the first place, to subject the will of the many to the few by channeling collective power in to a few individual's "sovereignty". as anarchists, we are opposed to this of course but that's just how it works and the philosophical connections should be obvious.

the only difference is the values and/or the ability to brainwash a lot of people to do your bidding. i'm not interested in doing that but I can observe the phenomena easily enough. sovereignty is a hell of a drug! give most people a few sips of power and watch them start lashing out with it. it's not pretty but it's very human!

Personal sovereignty has to do with supremacy over your own bloody self. This is more the Unique or the Übermensch, than the Führer who has power *over others*, has the entire nation on his back, and yady-yada... which would be a rather impersonal, collective sovereignty (that monarchs are) of a leader over "his" people. Individualism does not contain any idea of ruling over others, much less pretending supremacy over them. That is more what collectivists, socialists and commies are found to be into, IRL...

As individualist no one has power over me, I'm my own emperor, or at least this is what I'm tending to. This was Zo D'Axa's idea of individual autonomy.

The collective (no pun intended)... the Commune... the community... the nation... the family... humanity... all those things are spooks aimed at hindering my self-rule, intentionally or not.

Calm down and try to regain some hobo tranquility be drumming your fingers on the keyboard to a clickety-click rhythm reminiscent of the sound freight trains make. Then take a deep breath and listen to what I have to say. Lexicology suggests that the word, sovereign, derived from the Latin , superanus, and through the French souveraineté, the term was originally understood to mean the equivalent of supreme power. super + anus, an apt name for a power hungry leader. But in the non-political paradigm, or in contrary defiance of political authority, one could have the word sovereign to mean autonomous power of one's own, to be the king or queen of your own individual self.

Yeah, let's look at the reign in sovereign lol....

What anarchist wants to rule over themselves? This formulation is so odd. But for real, if you have to attach the modifier "self" or "personal" to sovereign then obviously the original meaning is not self-rule but just plain rule.

I have my own super power, my own super anus! You are correct, it is about rules, but in defiance of an external ruler, or from the latin "rex" =king, transforming to the word "reign" via Old English, I shall rule my own actions, I shall, with my own self-awareness and self-control, discipline myself to be an autonomous being, thinking and acting my own life, my own desires, without another, without THEIR permission or rules.

one last time for the dense skulls, just cuz i'm having fun watching you all get nosebleeds!

what's the difference between rule of the self and the other? or many others?

well! either i'm stronger, meaner, smarter, etc and I can make people do things through force or coercion AND i choose not to because of my anti-authoritarian values or something like them ... OR I just don't have any ability to do any of that, meaning i'm relatively powerless and all my personal values are just ... untested.

so yes, rule of the self or the other. a wise person once asked me, would you be a slave without a master or a king without slaves?

I like Immerwahr's more modern analysis (mostly familiar with his book, How to Hide an Empire) but he's definitely playing devil's advocate here or perhaps rocking some status quo confirmation biases of his own?

Like, every single one of his criticisms can be flipped back on itself if you're just a little more sympathetic to the large claims being made by Graeber and Wengrow.

Why did indigenous people get absorbed in to the dominant culture in the americas? (When they weren't being exterminated?!?!)
Don't overestimate the amount of agency they had and there's your answer. Same is highly likely true for ancient civilizations and the subjects of their conquest.

Asking the question in a more candid way provides a much better answer: why did people submit to the great machine of mass death and slavery? Well, the ones who didn't, ain't around anymore so it really skews the outcomes of the discussion lol

Basically, the conclusions your draw here reflect your politics in either direction and you can see him making the mistake of assigning way too much benevolence to nation states when asking "if they suck, why are they everywhere?!"

dude, why is cancer everywhere right before it kills the host? by this logic, cancer is the superior form of cellular organization.
he's just confusing scientific skepticism with not being an anarchist. it's ok daniel, we can't all be super smart and sexy with our understanding of history. maybe you'll get there some day champ!

Its not difficult, because a closely woven woolen blanket was as warm as a bison robe and was a tenth the weight, so easier to carry and store.
Don't get hungup on indigenous consciousness, humans are humans regardless of their origins.

well ACTUALLY *pushes glass up on nose*

this is materialist analysis and primitive accumulation so ... nothing much to do with identity?
think more like, honesty about military conquest and how it's not happy fun times.
and anyone who tells you a historical narrative that's conspicuously absent all the death and suffering is a fukin liar.

Anon is partially on the case if one considers the indigenous Empires of the Mayan, Aztecs and numerous European proto-Empire cosmopolitan mega-tribes which evolved along a politico-religious hierarchical power brockerage system of management which stifled individualism by exclusion, retribution or restitution, and participated in warfare and slavery. Perps when put together in large populations naturally and libidinally evolve into violence and oppression of the disenfranchised. Look around, after 10,000 years and things haven't changed.

"...and anyone who tells you a historical narrative that's conspicuously absent all the death and suffering is a fukin liar."

Watch the dualism, you have created a trap for yourself. Now, you must speak of death in suffering within all of your conversations!

...you put a historical narrative in to every conversation you have? that's weird. you're weird.

"Why did indigenous people get absorbed in to the dominant culture in the americas?"

because they seek food, excitement, and sex just every other human does to an extent.

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