(Originally posted at Liberal Street Fighter)
On this Fourth of July, I just wanted to pass along an interesting essay in today’s New York Times about the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and their influence on the founding of our American form of democratic government.
The Iroquois confederation was governed by a constitution, the Great Law of Peace, which established the league’s Great Council: 50 male royaneh (religious-political leaders), each representing one of the female-led clans of the alliance’s nations. What was striking to the contemporary eye was that the 117 codicils of the Great Law were concerned as much with constraining the Great Council as with granting it authority. “Their whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual,” explained Lewis Henry Morgan, a pioneering ethnographer of the Iroquois.
more on the flip…
The council’s jurisdiction was limited to relations among the nations and outside groups; internal affairs were the province of the individual nations. Even in the council’s narrow domain, the Great Law insisted that every time the royaneh confronted “an especially important matter or a great emergency,” they had to “submit the matter to the decision of their people” in a kind of referendum open to both men and women.
In creating such checks on authority, the league was just the most formal expression of a regionwide tradition. Although the Indian sachems on the Eastern Seaboard were absolute monarchs in theory, wrote the colonial leader Roger Williams, in practice they did not make any decisions “unto which the people are averse.” These smaller groups did not have formal, Iroquois-style constitutions, but their governments, too, were predicated on the consent of the governed. Compared to the despotisms that were the norm in Europe and Asia, the societies encountered by British colonists were a libertarian dream.
The essay goes on with many interesting ideas, some of which are perhaps more historically strong than others. However, it isn’t a stretch to say that our Founding Fathers were well aware of Iroquois ideals of government and it is known that Benjamin Franklin, in particular, had a keen interest in them.
Given this unique intertwining of U.S. and Iroquois history, it is particularly sad that the U.S. Supreme Court is right now in the process of attempting to finally wipe out Iroquois land claims which have been unresolved under a 200-year-old treaty signed by our first president, George Washington. You can find out more about what’s going on here.
