I apologize for the length of this diary–please understand that “rewriting history” is hard work! This is the second in a series of diaries posted in recognition of American Indian Heritage Month; related diaries and comments by others can be found here, here, here, here, here, here. Please, if I’ve missed any (and I probably have), place them in the comments and I will either update here or include in the next installation.
It has been a little over a year since I first entered the wild, wild world of the liberal blogosphere. In that time, I have noted again and again how little awareness there is for the roots of the democratic system upon which the United States Constitution and the US government are founded.
For most Americans, even here in the “sphere,” the commonly accepted narrative traces democracy’s ancient roots to Greece and Rome, through Medieval Europe’s Magna Carta, the European Enlightenment and finally to the shores of the “New World” where democracy miraculously sprang from the heads and hands of men like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison. John Locke and others in an act of Athenian creationism heard round the world. America’s record of events reads something like this excerpt from Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “Democracy”
literally, rule by the people (from the Greek dAmos, “people,” and kratos, “rule”). . . . (1) a form of government in which the right to make political decisions is exercised directly by the whole body of citizens, acting under procedures of majority rule, usually known as direct democracy; (2) a form of government in which the citizens exercise the same right not in person but through representatives chosen by and responsible to them, known as representative democracy; and (3) a form of government, usually a representative democracy, in which the powers of the majority are exercised within a framework of constitutional restraints designed to guarantee all citizens the enjoyment of certain individual or collective rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, known as liberal, or constitutional, democracy.
Democracy had its beginnings in certain of the city-states of ancient Greece in which . . . citizens were eligible for a variety of executive and judicial offices, some of which were filled by elections, while others were assigned by lot. . . . Greek democracy was a brief historical episode that had little direct influence on the development of modern democratic practices. Two millennia separated the fall of the Greek city-state and the rise of modern constitutional democracy.
Modern concepts of democratic government were shaped to a large extent by ideas and institutions of medieval Europe. . . . Gatherings of representatives of these interests were the origin of modern parliaments and legislative assemblies. The first document to notice such concepts and practices is Magna Carta (q.v.) of England, granted by King John in 1215.
Also of fundamental importance were the profound intellectual and social developments of the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions . . .. Two seminal documents of this period are the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).
Representative legislative bodies, freely elected under (eventual) universal suffrage, became in the 19th and 20th centuries the central institutions of democratic governments. In many countries, democracy also came to imply competition for office, freedom of speech and the press, and the rule of law. . . .
And yet, five hundred years ago, this continent was peopled by a population who participated in and were governed by a democratic system that emanated from and served the interests of collective survival. Then came “rugged individualism” and collective interests were clear-cut from the landscape to make way for the pilgrimages of “self-made” men. But it’s not as though there was no mutual exchange of ideas between the indigenous populations of the Americas and the incoming settler populations. Indeed, there is ample evidence indicating that many of the basic democratic principles which have since gone by the name of “American democracy” were in fact directly inspired by the Iroquois Constitution
Benjamin Franklin, in particular, is known to have greatly “appreciated” the blueprints for democracy outlined and practiced by the Six Nations of the Iroquois League. In his 1988 publication, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World , Jack Weatherford writes
Benjamin Franklin first became acquainted with the operation of Indian political organization in his capacity as official printer for the colony of Pennsylvania. His job included publication of the records and speeches of the various Indian assemblies and treaty negotiations, but following his instinctive curiosity, he broadened this into a study of Indian culture and institutions. . . . The colonial government of Pennsylvania offered him his first diplomatic assignment as their Indian commissioner. He held this post during the 1750s and became intimately familiar with the intricacies of the Indian political culture and in particular with the League of the Iroquois. After this taste of Indian diplomacy, Franklin became a lifelong champion of the Indian political structure and advocated its use by the Americans…Speaking to the Albany Congress in 1754, Franklin called on the delegates of the various English colonies to unite and emulate the Iroquois League… (136)
In his seminal work on the subject, Forgotten Founders Bruce E. Johansen tells us:
History’s popular writers have served us with many kinds of savages, noble and vicious, “good Indians” and “bad Indians,” nearly always as beings too preoccupied with the essentials of the hunt to engage in philosophy and statecraft.
This was simply not the case. Franklin and his fellow founders knew differently. They learned from American Indians, by assimilating into their vision of the future, aspects of American Indian wisdom and beauty. Our task is to relearn history as they experienced it, in all its richness and complexity, and thereby to arrive at a more complete understanding of what we were, what we are, and what we may become.
In the introduction to his subsequent Exemplar of Liberty (1990), co-written with Donald A. Grinde, Jr., Johansen writes:
. . . American history will not be complete until its indigenous aspects have been recognized and incorporated into the teaching of history. …The objective of the contemporary debate should be to define the role Native American precedents deserve in the broader ambit of American history. . . . the character of American democracy evolved importantly . . . from the examples provided by American Indian confederacies which ringed the land borders of the British colonies. These examples provided a reality, as well as exercise for the imagination . . .. In this book, we attempt to provide a picture of how these native confederacies operated, and how important architects of American institutions, ideals and other character traits perceived them. . . .
Native America had a substantial role in shaping all these ideas, as well as the events that turned colonies into a nation of states. In a way that may be difficult to understand from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, Native Americans were present at the conception of the United States. We owe part of our national soul to those who came before us on this soil.
So what went wrong? Was the Iroquois system inherently flawed, or how is it that a system of participatory democracy which served collective interests for nearly a thousand years was reduced to the pathetic skeleton of its former self that we witness ruining the country today? Weatherford touches upon these issues when he says “Even though the Founding Fathers finally adopted some of the essential features of the Iroquois League, they never followed it in quite the detail advocated by Franklin.”
Democracy as we know it today in America is a motherless child whose adoptive fathers threw the baby out with the bathwater at birth–by way of selective appropriation.
When I speak in terms of “selective appropriation,” it is in anticipation of the inevitable question: well, isn’t it an honor to the Iroquois, isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery? My answer: it’s not the “borrowing” that’s objectionable, it’s the selective borrowing–by taking only parts of the system and eliminating constructive elements thereof–the foundering fathers violated the spirit of the system.
This, in my view, is where the Founding Fathers foundered, and the disastrous fallout of this “selective appropriation” is evident in the death throes of democracy we witness today. To my mind, most relevant are three particular points in which the “founding fathers” foundered by failing to follow the features of the Iroquois League to the letter, choosing instead to introduce changes which, each in its turn, led to breaches of the underlying social contract which has ultimately caused the entire system to collapse.
But before seeking to disentangle this “thread,” let’s look at what is meant by the “white roots of peace,” for this is the structural and conceptual model–that is, the basic constitutive premise–upon which the democratic principles of the Great Law of the Iroquois rest. These are the real roots of democracy in America, and in this sense, it is here that we must return in order to get at the truth what went wrong if we ever hope to fix it.
The final chapter of Jack Weatherford’s Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America is called “The White Roots of Peace.” Weatherford writes:
The Hiawatha Wampum survives as the oldest constitution in North America, perhaps the oldest in the world. [. . .] it signifies the union of the nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois League, founded approximately six hundred years ago by Deganawidah and Hiawatha.
[. . . ] The symbols depict four squares joined like the links of a chain, with a tree in the center of the belt. They represent the nations of the league united with one another by the chain of friendship. The tree signifies law and peace, and its branches represent the security and shelter given to humans by the law. Deganawidah named this constitution Kaianerekowa, and he taught that peace and law had to be inseparable (Native Roots, 286).
Deganawidah, the leader of the Haudenosaunee, persuaded all the warriors to bury their weapons in a cavern beneath a certain tree–once he’d established peace, he planted a new one in honor of that peace and so that future generations would be reminded of his “philosophy of Good Mind” as a pre-condition for peace. This became the Great Tree of Peace and represented the structure and Spirit of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace. Weatherford elaborates on the White Roots of Peace:
The tree had four large white roots, each of which grew in a different direction. Deganawidah prophesied that the roots of the tree would eventually grow to the far parts of the world, that in time the four roots would grow to include new nations of people not yet known. From many nations they would create one.
This story was already an ancient one when the first settlers came from Europe, and the native people shared their knowledge of the Good Mind with the newcomers. The new people came to live under the Great Tree of Peace, but they did not know its history. They did not know of the weapons buried in the earth, or of the white roots of peace that needed to be watered and nourished to help the tree grow. (287)
And another equally important point: since the first person to heed Deganawidah’s appeal to peace was a woman, Jikohnsaseh, in her honor
he selected women as the Clan Mothers, to lead the family clans and select the male chiefs.
Women were given the right to the chief’s titles and the power to remove dissident chiefs. Jikohnsaseh, by hearing of her actions, taught me to respect women and honor their role. Women are the connection to the earth and have the responsibility for the future of the nation. Men will want to fight. Women know the true price of war and must encourage the chiefs to seek a peaceful resolution.
The Iroquois were and remain a matriarchal, matrifocal and matrilineal society. Women were actively involved in issues of governance, and, in fact, assigned crucial, decision-making roles: according the Great Law, women not only appoint, but also have the power to impeach the representatives they have selected and to determine when and if said representatives have failed to uphold or in any way infringed upon the principles of the Great Law.
Women’s active participation in government did not sit well with the Founding Fathers who certainly did not leave their patriarchal structures and prejudices behind when the left the motherland and set out in search of a New World. Grinde and Johansen provide a fairly in-depth analysis of this in Exemplar of Liberty
[One] aspect of native American life that alternately intrigued, perplexed and sometimes alarmed European and European-American observers, nearly all of whom were male during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the role of Indian women. In many cases they held pivotal positions in native political systems. The Iroquois women, for example, nominated men to positions of leadership, and could “dehorn,” or impeach, them for misconduct. Women usually approved men’s plans for war. In a matrilineal society, and nearly all the confederacies that bordered the colonies were matrilineal, women owned all household goods except the men’s clothes, weapons, and hunting implements. They also were the primary conduits of culture from generation to generation.
As far as I can tell, three central points of departure from the Iroquois League model have contributed substantially to American democracy’s demise:
- switching from a principle of consensus to one of “majority rules”
- forming a government of the people, by the people and for the people rather than of the people, by the people and for future generations
- allowing for the conceptually inconceivable task of “giving birth” to a democracy to be delegated by men rather than women
Consensus vs. Majority Rules
The difference between a consensus-based system and one of majority rules is substantial, and the Founding Fathers’ failure to follow the model of the Iroquois may be considered the foundational error in their selective appropriation. One site offering a basic overview of the Iroquois system says of the Grand Council
The Chiefs do not vote on matters, but discuss them from all perspectives. Each option must be considered. Consensus requires thoughtful analysis and sensitive negotiation. Different points of view must reach a compromise that is acceptable to all. While this requires more deliberation, it eliminates a dissenting minority because no decision is made unless all sides agree.
In a consensus-based system, everyone comes to the table knowing s/he is not going to come away from it with everything s/he wants. There is no such thing as a “non-negotiable” issue; the point is to move keep moving, however slowly, toward an agreed upon “compromise,” so a “no-budge” position is not an option because the objective is movement, movement toward a compromise that everyone can live with. Consensus is not a winner-takes-all game of “I get all the marbles”: it’s a win-win/I-get-some-you-get-some and we all come away from it with at least some of our marbles intact. Partners in negotiation must be willing to sacrifice some marbles–that is the basic agreement of the social contract.
A majority-rules based system inevitably results in some people gloating in victory and others wallowing in the despair of defeat. Majority rule necessarily creates a discontented minority, so majority rules will never lead to a genuinely peaceful system of governance. As long as there is a clear majority, let’s say around 70 to 30, the inherently faulty majority rules system will always falter, but is not likely to collapse. It approaches the breaking point somewhere around 50/50. Even the illusion of a fifty-fifty split in the populace of a majority-rules system can precipitate the collapse by balancing the scales in the majority-minority dichotomy so that six of one basically becomes half a dozen of the other while fifty percent of the population gets to keep all the marbles and the remaining fifty percent loses its marbles. The result is sheer insanity.
For the People versus For Future Generations
At present, political, social and economic decisions in this country are made with an eye for their impact on the next fiscal quarter–at best, they are calibrated with regard for their four-year (i.e., one presidential term) consequences. This has led to the short-sightedness, historical amnesia and short-term memory loss for which this country has since become infamous. The basic assumption underlying the notion of a government “for the people” as it is understood by beneficiaries and subjects to the US Constitution is that people living in any given “now” make decisions on their own behalf and primarily to protect their own interests–in the here and now; while the Preamble, in stating the intent to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” gives a casual nod to the sake and the stake of the future, there is no real commitment to “future generations” in the principle or in the practice of US Constitutional law and governance.
Women as Sources of Authority versus Women as Subjects of Authority
Well into the twentieth-century, women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage fought for a woman’s right to vote, women of the Iroquois had always assumed a prominent role in governing the Iroquois people.
This May 16, 1914 illustration from Puck depicting a group of Indian women observing Susan B. Anthony, Anne Howard Shaw and Elizabeth Cady Stanton leading suffragist rally contained the text:
“Savagery to Civilization”
We, the women of the Iroquois
Own the Land, the Lodge, the Children
Ours is the right to adoption, life or death;
Ours is the right to raise up and depose chiefs;
Ours is the right to representation in all councils;
Ours is the right to make and abrogate treaties;
Ours is the supervision over domestic and foreign policies;
Ours is the trusteeship of tribal property;
Our lives are valued again as high as man’s.
We will never know what the course of history would have been had the foundering fathers taken their lead from the Iroquois on this point, and speculation in this regard will get us nowhere. Logic, however, might.
The following statement presented to the United Nations in 1995 by Carol Jacobs, Cayuga Bear Clan Mother, outlines some of the logic behind women’s position in matriarchal cultures and points to plausible reasons for not only allowing women to participate in a functioning democracy, but mandating that they assume prominent decision-making roles:
Among us, it is women who are responsible for fostering life. In our traditions, it is women who carry the seeds, both of our own future generations and of the plant life. [. . .] It is my right and duty, as a woman and a mother and a grandmother, to speak to you about these things, to bring our minds together on them. . . .
In making any law, our chiefs must always consider three things: the effect of their decision on peace; the effect on the natural world; and the effect on seven generations in the future. We believe that all lawmakers should be required to think this way, that all constitutions should contain these rules. . . .
All too often, these traditions are viewed as “things of the past”–dismissed as long forgotten, now archaic “Indian lore.” But, that is not the case. Modern-day Haudenosaunee have included this point in their list of “Ten Important Points to Remember”:
We exist as distinct peoples in the 20th century. The Haudenosaunee are unique in that we maintain one of the very few traditional governments in North America, free from the oppression of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and free from the lunacy of tribal elections. Our leaders are selected according to the oldest constitutional democratic systems.
Democracy may be dead for most of America, but its white roots remain. The legend, the spirit and the Great Law of the Land live on in the Iroquois Nations today.
Jake Swamp, widely considered one of the most knowledgeable sources on The Great Law, founded Tree of Peace Society in 1984]:
Tekaronianeken , Jake Swamp with thirty years as a Mohawk chief and representative on the Grand Council of the Iroquois Confederacy has offered a wide range of experience in indigenous, environmental and social issues both locally and internationally. Beginning in the summer of 2000 Jake has been an active participant in the National Conference of Community and Justice and met with President Clinton and many other religious leaders to discuss reconciliation and cultural diversity. Jake was also among the Iroquois delegations that addressed the United Nations Millennium Peace summit, August 2000.
Jake has inspired a new generation of Mohawk leaders and teachers who are now taking the place of Elders in the communities of the Iroquois and was directly involved in the creation of the Akwesasne Freedom School – a Mohawk language immersion school of critical acclaim that has been an inspiration to many First Nation peoples in the United States and Canada. Jake has inspired hundreds of people of many races and culture through working with a number of influential organizations. As result of his thirty years experience as a sub-chief of the Mohawk Nation and international ambassador, Jake has been traveling around the world, planting “Trees of Peace” in diverse places such as Israel, Australia, South America, United Nations, St. Johns’ Cathedral in New York City and over twenty colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Through his tree planting efforts, Jake has inspired the planting of over 200 million trees. Jake continues to inspire many college students of all races and backgrounds through his extensive lecturing schedule which takes him to over 10 universities and other speaking engagements a year.
A brief biography of Oren Lyons, another well-versed expert on the Great Law, reads as follows:
Oren Lyons is Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation, Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy). Oren has also been active in international indigenous rights and sovereignty issues for over three decades at the United Nations and other international forums. He is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is also the publisher of “Daybreak,” a national Native American news magazine.
Here is an excerpt from Oren Lyons’ statements addressing delegates to the United Nations in the opening ceremonies for the “The Year of the Indigenous Peoples” (1993):
Our societies are based upon great democratic principles of the authority of the people and equal responsibilities for the men and the women. This was a great way of life across this Great Turtle Island and freedom with respect was everywhere. Our leaders were instructed to be men of vision and to make every decision on behalf of the seventh generation to come; to have compassion and love for those generations yet unborn. We were instructed to give thanks for All That Sustains Us.
It is from these living traditions, from these living men and women that we might turn for insights into resurrecting and learning to sustain our democracy.
