Native America and the Evolution of Democracy

An interesting online text on Native Democracy and its impact on colonial America and thus the basis of the libertarian chants democratic that echo through out American history.

Exemplar of Liberty:
Native America and the Evolution of Democracy

By
Donald A. Grinde, Jr.
Rupert Costo Professor of American Indian History
University of California at Riverside
and
Bruce E. Johansen
Associate Professor of Communication
University of Nebraska at Omaha

Every king hath his council, and that consists of all the
old and wise men of his nation. . . . [N]othing is under-
taken, be it war, peace, the selling of land or traffick,
without advising with them; and which is more, with the
young men also. . . . The kings . . . move by the breath
of their people. It is the Indian custom to deliberate. . . .
I have never seen more natural sagacity.
	--William Penn to the Society of Free Traders, 16 August 1683

Coming from societies based on hierarchy, early European explorers and settlers came to America seeking kings and queens and princes. What they sought they believed they had found, for a time. Quickly, they began to sense a difference: the people they were calling "kings" had few trappings that distinguished them from the people they "ruled," in most native societies. They only rarely sat at the top of a class hierarchy with the pomp of European rulers. More importantly, Indian "kings" usually did not rule. Rather, they led, by mechanisms of consensus and public opinion that Europeans often found admirable.

During the 170 years between the first enduring English settlement in North America and the American Revolution, the colonists' perceptions of their native neighbors evolved from the Puritans' devil-man, through the autonomous Noble Savage, to a belief that the native peoples lived in confederations governed by natural law so subtle, so nearly invisible, that it was widely believed to be an attractive alternative to monarchy's overbearing hand. The Europeans' perceptions of Indian societies evolved as they became more dissatisfied with the European status quo. Increasingly, the native societies came to serve the transplanted Europeans, including some of the United States' most influential founders, as a counterpoint to the European order. They found in existing native polities the values that the seminal European documents of the time celebrated in theoretical abstraction -- life, liberty, happiness, a model of government by consensus, under natural rights, with relative equality of property. The fact that native peoples in America were able to govern themselves in this was provided advocates of alternatives to monarchy with practical ammunition for a philosophy of government based on the rights of the individual, which they believed had worked, did work, and would work for them, in America.

By 1776, Iroquois imagery was used not only in treatymaking but also as a pervasive idiom in American society. A few weeks after Paine's use of Iroquois imagery, John Adams (Paine's fellow delegate from Massachusetts) would have dinner with several Caughnawaga Mohawk chiefs and their wives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. George Washington and his staff also were present. Washington introduced Adams to the Mohawks chiefs as one of the members "of the Grand Council Fire at Philadelphia" and Adams noted in a letter to his wife that the Mohawks were impressed with Washington's introduction. Although it can be argued that George Washington and the Continental Congress used American Indian rhetoric and imagery to explain to Native American people the nature of the new American government, such an argument does not explain how such rhetoric begins to occur in Robert Treat Paine's private correspondence to Non-Indians. Actually, the ideas and symbols of Native America became important facets in the formation of a new American identity.

And the Six Nations, Iroquois confederacy that so influenced the founding fathers of America also influenced Marx and Engels.

Two contemporaries of Buffalo Bill, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, about the time of the Custer Battle were drawing on the Indian models to support their theories of social evolution. As had Franklin and Jefferson a century before, Marx and Engels paid particular attention to the lack of state-induced coercion and the communal role of property that operated in the Iroquois Confederacy.

Marx read Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, which had been published in 1877, between December 1880 and March 1881, taking at least ninety-eight pages of handwritten notes. Ancient Society was Morgan's last major work; his first book-length study had been The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851). Morgan was a close friend of the Seneca Ely Parker, a high-ranking Civil War officer. Like Johnson, Weiser, Colden, and others, Morgan was an adopted Iroquois. When Marx read Morgan's Ancient Society, he and Engels were studying the important anthropologists of their time. Morgan was one of them.

Marx's notes on Ancient Society adhere closely to the text, with little extraneous comment. What particularly intrigued Marx about the Iroquois was their democratic political organization, and how it was meshed with a communal economic system -- how, in short, economic leveling was achieved without coercion.

During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Marx remained an insatiable reader, but a life of poverty and attendant health problems had eroded his ability to organize and synthesize what he had read. After Marx died, Engels inherited his notes and, in 1884, published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, subtitled In Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. The book sold well; it had gone through four editions in German by 1891. Engels called the book a "bequest to Marx." He wrote that Morgan's account of the Iroquois Confederacy "substantiated the view that classless communist societies had existed among primitive peoples," and that these societies had been free of some of the evils, such as class stratification, that he associated with industrial capitalism. Jefferson had been driven by similar evils to depict Europe in metaphors of wolves and sheep, hammer and anvil.

To Engels, Morgan's description of the Iroquois was important because "it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state." Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois' ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier:

Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households -- still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal -- including the women.

Concern for the depredations of human rights by state power is no less evident in our time than in the eighteenth century. American Indians, some of the earliest exemplars of those rights, today often petition the United Nations for redress of abuses committed by the United States government, whose founding declarations often ring hollow in ears so long calloused by the thundering horsehooves of Manifest Destiny and its modern equivalents. One may ask what the United Nations' declarations of human rights owe to the Iroquois and other Indian nations. Take the following excerpts from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted December 10, 1948), and place them next to the Great Law of Peace, and the statements Franklin and other American national fathers adapted from experience with American Indian nations:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1)

Every person has a right to life, liberty and security of person. (Article 3)

Everyone has a right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. (Article 18)

Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and religion. (Article 19)

. . . The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of governments . . . (Article 21)

Looking across the frontier, as well as across the Atlantic, looking at Indian peace as well as Indian wars, history poses many tantalizing questions. The thesis that American Indian thought played an important role in shaping the mind of European America, and of Europe itself, is bound to incite controversy, a healthy state of intellectual affairs at any time in history, our own included. The argument around which this book is centered is only one part of a broader effort not to rewrite history, but to expand it, to broaden our knowledge beyond the intellectual strait jacket of ethnocentricism that tells us that we teach, but we do not learn from, peoples and cultures markedly different from our own.

See:

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra

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Australia Vs. Canada

In Canada the Conservative Government refuses to apologize to aboriginal peoples for the residential school scandal. In Australia they also refuse to apologize, recognize or pay for their assimilation policy.

Prime minister John Howard's government has refused to apologise for the Stolen Generation and resisted calls to set up a compensation fund.

This week Mr Trevorrow, 50, won a landmark compensation claim in the South Australian supreme court, the first payment of its kind. A judge awarded him A$525,000 (£220,000), acknowledging that he had been "falsely imprisoned by the state", that the authorities had failed in their duty of care towards him and that such conduct had ruptured the bond between him and his natural family, leading to lifelong depression.

Of course Liberal Government was forced by the Supreme Court to recognize the British Colonial legacy of Aboriginal Assimilation , which was assimilate or die, and pay out for the residential school program. Which is the only reason the current Conservative Government is making any payout.

Aboriginals spent decades fighting to have the government recognize the abuses they suffered in the school system that Ottawa supported financially between the 1870s and 1970s.

Tens of thousands of First Nations young people were taken from their families for months at a time and deprived of their culture. Many were sexually or physically abused by school staff.

In 1998, Ottawa acknowledged that there was widespread abuse at the schools and offered an apology to the victims.

The former Liberal government announced a $1.9-billion compensation package to residential school survivors in late 2005, along with $60 million for the TRC, $10 million for commemoration and $125 million for healing initiatives and programs. Less than a year later, the Conservative government approved the deal, and increased funding for commemoration to $20 million.

But like their Australian counterparts the Canadian Conservative Government still refuses to formerly apologize.

Phillip also cited the Harper government's refusal to apologise for Canada's decades-long programme of forcing First Nations children into the notorious residential school system, where they were denied contact with relatives and stripped of their cultural heritage. According to one government report, conditions were so terrible that between 1894 and 1908, the death rate among students at residential schools in Western Canada ranged from 35 percent to 60 percent.

The last residential school closed in 1997 amid revelations of widespread sexual and physical abuse of students in the system. A compensation package was approved through the courts, but many First Nations viewed the decision as not going far enough.

SEE:

Post Modern Conservatives

Howard Visits Canada

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An End to Colonial Assimilation?

With the Harper Governments announcement that it was abandoning forty years of colonial assimilation that was Liberal Indian policy of Trudeau and Chretien. This is one Liberal policy I am happy to see torn up. Could this be a new beginning for Canada's First Nations peoples?

Statement of the Government Of Canada On Indian Policy, 1969

Presented to the First Session of the Twenty-Eighth Parliament

by the Honorable Jean Chrétien, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

The Government believes that its policies must lead to the full, free and non-discriminatory participation of the Indian people in Canadian society. Such a goal requires a break with the past. It requires that the Indian people's roles of dependence be replaced by a role of equal status, opportunity and responsibility, a role they can share with all other Canadians.

The policies proposed recognize the simple reality that the separate legal status of Indians and the policies which have flowed from it have kept the Indian people apart from and behind other Canadians. The Indian people have not been full citizens of the communities and provinces in which they live and have not enjoyed the equality and benefits that such participation offers.

Ironically it is a policy that Harpers grey eminence Tom Flanagan of the Calgary School agrees with.

“Europeans are, in effect, a new immigrant wave, taking control of land just as earlier aboriginal settlers did. To differentiate the rights of earlier and later immigrants is a form of racism.”

So sayeth Tom Flanagan, Stephen Harper’s advisor and mentor, a political science professor who the Tory leader first met at the University of Calgary.

In order to become self-supporting
and get beyond the social pathologies
that are ruining their communities,
aboriginal people need to acquire the
skills and attitudes that bring success
in a liberal society, political democracy,
and market economy. Call it assimilation,
call it integration, call it
adaptation, call it whatever you want:
it has to happen.
Tom Flanagan, First Nations?
Second Thoughts, pp.195-196.

And Harpers announcement would be more credible if this wasn't happening;

- Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice replaced some of the country's most seasoned federal land-claim negotiators with hand-picked choices who have comparatively less experience - including his former law partner. Critics say the unusual political handling of the lucrative contracts is further proof that Conservative vows to shun patronage were hollow at best. It will also slow down complex land-claim talks as new negotiators climb steep learning curves, they say.

And while the Harpocrite Government practices realpolitik to avoid a showdown with First Nations peoples, their reactionary right-whing republican base uses this opportunity to attack the leadership of of those same first nations as unconstitutional.

According to a press release from the right-leaning Canadian Constitution Foundatiom, prominent legal experts agree with Chief Mountain and Nisibilada that the “third order” of government created by the Nisga’a Treaty violates Canada ’s constitution. Retired Supreme Court of Canada Justices William McIntyre and the late Willard Estey, retired B.C. Court of Appeal Justice D.M. Michael Goldie, former NDP Attorney-General Alex MacDonald, the late Mel Smith, Q.C. and former B.C. Attorney-General Geoff Plant have all stated publicly that parts of the Nisga’a Treaty are unconstitutional and therefore illegal.

Chief Mountain’s constitutional challenge has received funding from the Canadian Constitution Foundation, a registered charity with a mandate to promote and defend Canadians’ constitutional freedoms.

The foundation's website says it was founded in 2002 to explain to Canadians "the role of the Constitution in their daily lives, to teach them how to recognize infringements and abuse of the Constitution in the world around them, and to help them defend its principles from improper decisions or actions of governments, regulators, tribunals or special-interest groups."

The foundation, which believes the Constitution only recognizes two levels of government - federal and provincial - has a board of directors comprising some prominent conservatives.

Its board includes Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard magazine, and William Johnston, a family physician in Vancouver and president of Canadian Physicians for Life.

Foundation executive director John Carpay, a former Alberta director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, says the Nisga'a dissidents claim that the treaty "violates their constitutional rights as Canadians. It does so by creating a third order of government that is not accountable to either Ottawa or Victoria. "

One Step forward two steps back. Of course recognition of liberal human rights vs. collective rights is what this is all about. Whether Trudeau or Harper, both the Liberals and Conservatives see assimilation of first nations as an imperative, no matter what else they say. It's what they do that counts.

For over 100 years, aboriginal children, about 150,000 of them - Metis, Indian and Inuit, some only five years old - were yanked out of their homes and jammed into residential schools, some hundreds of miles from their families. They were not allowed to speak their native language, many died from tuberculosis and others suffered sexual, emotional and physical abuse.

In a shameful attempt to cover their butts, governments passed legislation that made it illegal to resist giving up these children, thus legalizing cultural assassination.
Given this history and the documented facts, it was heartening to see 270 MPs vote to apologize, but it was mostly symbolic since Prime Minister Stephen Harper has refused to issue an official apology. In fact, he sent Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice out to say such an act could be years away. There is a word for the government's action, it's "disgraceful."

There are still 80,000 natives alive to whom it applies.

The Harper government continues to stall on what is an abomination. It sits on its hands despite the fact the Chretien government admitted in 1998 that native students had been badly treated, and in 2005 a compensation offer of $2 billion was introduced for surviving students. But in the meantime, a sneaky band of Tories has decided that a special investigative commission will travel across Canada before any apology is issued. This is a stubborn, hard-hearted stance, and the prime minister should be ashamed of himself.

Canada's decision to withdraw support for the United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples coincided with a visit to Ottawa by Prime Minister John Howard of Australia -- a country that strongly opposes the declaration.

Shortly after Mr. Howard's meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in May, 2006, Mr. Harper called Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice to tell him to review Canada's position of support, government sources said yesterday.

Although previous Liberal governments had difficulty with the declaration that had taken more than two decades to craft, by 2005 Canada was fully supportive and actively encouraging other countries to sign on.

But the United States and Australia remained staunchly opposed. And Mr. Harper walked away from his meeting with Mr. Howard believing the declaration would be problematic, the sources said.

"It was very much the Prime Minister [Harper] directing Prentice to relook at this thing," a source said.

Mr. Prentice has since said there are concerns that the declaration is unconstitutional, that it could prevent military activities on aboriginal land and that it could harm existing land deals.

SEE:

Mike Harris and State Terrorism

Tories Crush Whistleblower

Land claim

Alcoholism Is Colonialism

Bev Oda Minister of Aboriginal Affairs

Hewers of Wood

Cardston Home of Bigots

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Mike Harris and State Terrorism

Golf Pro; Mike Harris, created the conditions that lead to Dudley George's death, yet he remains unrepentant. After all he was only protecting a golf course from uppity natives.

The result was once again the State and its police acting against the first nations peoples,to protect property they stole.

This decision, and Harris's refusal to do the right thing, will add fuel to fire the native resistance movement that is growing across Kanada.

In an unwarranted rush to end an aboriginal protest in 1995, former premier Mike Harris made a vulgar, racist remark and "created the risk of placing political pressure on the police" hours before an officer killed unarmed protester Dudley George, the commissioner of a public inquiry has found.

Later, Mr. Harris misled the Ontario Legislature about a high-level meeting he attended, with Ontario Provincial Police officers present, before the shooting, which gave "the appearance of inappropriate interference in police operations" and thus prompted the $25.6-million inquiry, Judge Sidney Linden found.

Harris lawyer offers no apology for aboriginal protester's death

In the historical context, Ipperwash was not surrendered but the lands were taken under the War Measures Act in 1942. The land was taken to build a military camp and it was supposed to be returned immediately when it was no longer in use but the government failed to do so. During the years that followed the First Nations at Aazhoodena (Ipperwash), Stoney Point did try to get their traditional lands back. Since the military encampment was built on an ancient Indian burial ground it is only natural for the First Nations people of the area to want to put there ancestors back to rest. Especially so, considering the encampment did disturb the grounds where there ancestors slept peacefully. Also, since the bulldozing that was going on to build a golf course destroyed most of the burial site.

The claim was settled in 1998 and the land was finally returned to reserve members after more than five decades. A $26-million settlement was made and each member of the Stoney and Kettle Point First Nations reserves received a share that ranged between $150,000 and $400,000.

SEE:

Tories Crush Whistleblower

Land claim

Alcoholism Is Colonialism

Bev Oda Minister of Aboriginal Affairs

Hewers of Wood

Cardston Home of Bigots

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Caledonia, First Nations, Ontario, land claim, Canada, politics, aboriginal, native, Six Nations, Mike Harris, Dudley George, OPP, Ipperwash,Mohawk,

Clear Language Or Clean Water

Which would you prefer clean tap water or clear language signs warning you that the water is dangerous to drink. This is the Tories action plan for cleaning up the toxic water on Canada's reserves, improve the signage.

Chief David General of Six Nations in Ontario said he is aware that people in his community drink their tap water even though it is not safe and that some people get sick as a result.

General said many people do not even notice the signs that warn them not to drink tap water.

Health Canada says a drinking water advisory is a way to advise members of the public in a specific community that they should use an alternative source of drinking water.

It says it is a measure designed to protect public health from waterborne contaminants that could be present in drinking water.

In March 2006, Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Jim Prentice launched a plan of action to address drinking water problems in First Nation communities.

General said many aboriginal communities would rather have a new water plant instead of a new communications strategy.

Like wait times, aboriginal peoples are still waiting for clean water.

H/T to Red Jenny.

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