In the mid-1980s, my wife Karen took me on a camping trip in the American Southwest. We stopped at Chaco Culture National Park. 
It was immediately evident that a very sophisticated civilization had created these structures and figured out how to live in a semi-arid environment with trade ties to distant places in what is now Mexico. Somehow, I had either missed this lesson in my history classes or, after only a brief thought, it struck me how Eurocentric my education had been. A few years later, we took another camping trip to Chiapas state in southernmost Mexico. Another revelation is that a large, very sophisticated civilization existed here long before Europeans brought our version of civilization to these heathens.
The 18th-century European Enlightenment is another case of history written until recently entirely through the lenses of Northern European white men.1
The Enlightenment featured concepts like rationalism, empiricism, natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, constitutional government, and the formal separation of church and state. But nothing is mentioned of the vast majority of the population. Women and all of the non-elite male population. Nothing is mentioned about the people subsumed in the colonial empires built during this period. No, the Enlightenment was really only for upper-class white men.
Most recently, I came across this discussion of the emergence of feminist thinking in upstate NY in the middle of the 19th century. Without a Whisper – Konnon:Kwe – a film by Katsitsionni Fox (currently available for streaming on PBS). This 26-minute documentary explores the connections between the white female suffragists of upstate NY and the Indigenous peoples that surrounded them, all run by women.
Decolonizing our history and our views of the world is important and ongoing.
Footnotes
- See some corrective work here: Losurdo, Domenico, Elliott, Gregory. Liberalism a Counter-History, 2014. and Charles W. Mills: “Liberalism and Racial Justice” https://youtu.be/n7KVrx42aqI?si=sL1PvqxqDn_4atJ1
