A report from China helped Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746) find a plant near a Mohawk village. He had read a missionary’s description of Asian ginseng and searched for something like it around Kahnawake, near Montreal. When he found a specimen, an Indigenous woman recognized it as a familiar remedy. The American plant was a related species, and the encounter gave Lafitau a striking example of how information from distant places could illuminate what lay before him.
He brought a comparable habit of inquiry to human customs. In Mœurs des sauvages amériquains (1724), his comparison of Indigenous American life with the earliest recorded societies, practices he had encountered in Canada appeared beside those described by ancient Mediterranean authors. Each helped him interpret the other. Living communities seemed to make difficult passages in old books intelligible, while the books supplied an ancestry for what he observed.
Lafitau believed the resemblances pointed toward a common human and religious beginning. His evidence came from his own experience, the knowledge of older missionaries, written reports, and Indigenous informants. He acknowledged that he had not witnessed some ceremonies himself. The published work brought these different kinds of testimony together without always allowing later readers to recover the people behind them.
Indigenous communities had histories and explanations of their own, while Lafitau sought evidence for a much more remote biblical ancestry. His book preserved valuable observations through an arrangement that redirected their meaning. The difference was already visible in his account of the plant. For the woman who recognized it, the root was a familiar medicine; for the missionary, it also became a reason to investigate an ancient connection between America and Asia.