Cultural Ventriloquism and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Teaching Lahontan’s Dialogues avec un sauvage in the Early 2020s

This article discusses teaching Lahontan’s 1703 Dialogues avec un sauvage to twenty-first century students at an American public university in the wake of the scandal that surrounded Jeanine Cummins’ 2020 novel American Dirt, which was widely denounced for appropriating a narrative beyond the author’s lived experience. In allowing that Lahontan’s apocryphal dialogue with a Canadian Native American, Adario (based on the real-life Haudenosaunee sachem Kandiaronk), might deserve to be “canceled” in a similar way, students were invited to adopt a critical posture with respect to this highly critical text, eschewing veneration for engagement with ideas. The result was a robust conversation about how this fictionalized encounter might or might not allow for the emergence of an authentic Native American critique of European values and the particular relevance for contemporary students of the ways in which Adario frames consent as both a political and interpersonal imperative of free people.