David Graeber in his best selling book, The Dawn of Everything, wrote the following about Brother Gabriel Sagard’s (a Franciscan missionary living in Quebec in 1628) understanding the difference between the communication skills of local Wendat people compared with the Europeans.  The Indians

“… cast a jaundiced eye at French habits of conversation. Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be particularly bright. People who tried to grab the stage, denying others the means to present their arguments, were acting in much the same way as those who grabbed the material means of subsistence and refused to share it.”

Resources on dialogue…

We can survive… but can we communicate?

Dialogue Tools