Isaiah Lorado Wilner

Isaiah Lorado Wilner, “A Global Potlatch: Identifying the Indigenous Influence on Western Thought,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013): 87–114.

In a “A Global Potlatch” Wilner reads the global history of ideas from the inside out, arguing that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Kwakwaka’wakw people of British Columbia did more than merely react to the process of colonialism initiated and directed by outsiders. As demonstrated through the life and writing of German-­?American anthropologist Franz Boas, Indigenous intellectuals and leaders such as George Hunt actively sought to communicate to outsiders their vision of a world where people are not separated by difference so much as united by their shared capacity for transformation. Boas proved receptive and his new understanding of culture as process, now recognized as a major element of Western thought, deserves to be recognized as having its roots in the laws, lifeways, and philosophy of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples.