Etowah Valley, between Georgia and Tennessee, North America. The city of Etowah, founded in 1200 and the capital of a sort of local kingdom, was sacked and its sacred sites desecrated. It was then abandoned and reoccupied several times, but never permanently. We find ourselves at the heart of the so-called future five nations or civilized tribes of North America: the Cherokee in Tennessee, the Chickasaw in Arkansas, the Choctaw in Louisiana, the Muskogee Creek in Georgia, and the Seminole in Florida, all governed by tribal councils with consensus-based decision-making systems. A system that would continue until the 19th century. Tribal political discussions were always conducted under the influence of smoke, and sometimes even coffee, because, the natives said, smoking gave them intelligence and allowed them to clearly understand complex issues. Indigenous North American ideas, the defense of individual liberties (the freedom to distance oneself, to disobey, to experiment with new social forms) and skepticism toward revealed religion, would influence the European Enlightenment. And so would the habits of smoking tobacco and drinking coffee… It would be excessive to say that the Enlightenment took its first steps in Native North American communities, but it is possible to imagine a possible, non-Eurocentric future history in which such a hypothesis would not be treated as scandalous and absurd by definition.
