8 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
The King Site: Continuity and Contact in Sixteenth Century Georgia. Edited by Robert L. Blakely.
Recommended from our members
American Indian Identity: Today’s Changing Perspectives. Edited by Clifford E. Trafzer.
Recommended from our members
A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War 1680–1730. By Steven J. Oatis.
Recommended from our members
Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers. Edited by James A. Clifton.
Recommended from our members
Reaching the Grassroots: The Worldwide Diffusion of Iroquois Democratic Traditions
After many years of intense debate, the idea that the Iroquois helped shape democracy has passed into the realm of general knowledge the length and breadth of “Turtle Island,” and beyond. Although a few brushfires of criticism remain in academia, many people and organizations have been applying Iroquois political principles in their daily lives. As of 21 November 2003 our roster of annotations had reached 1,404 items. According to our records, the issue of Iroquois influence had appeared in 350 books; 184 articles in scholarly journals, including commentaries, letters to the editor, book and film reviews, and bibliographies; 169 other periodical articles, including book reviews; 377 newspaper or news-service articles, columns, letters, or book reviews, and 189 websites. Additionally, influence has been raised in 82 other venues, including several documentary films; a commencement speech at Wellesley College by Gloria Steinem; a radio essay by Hugh Downs; a presidential proclamation by Bill Clinton, several college course outlines and other school curricula; a segment of Larry King Live on Cable News Network; a speech by Canadian Minister of Constitutional Affairs Joe Clark; and a feature film, The Indian in the Cupboard, in 1995. The subject now has its own Library of Congress classification, citations in three dozen legal journals, and was mentioned by Janet Reno in a speech when she was U.S. Attorney General
Recommended from our members
The Debate Regarding Native American Precedents for Democracy: A Recent Historiography
After fifteen years examining the native roots of American democracy, the authors have been intrigued, sometimes mystified, and often surprised as the subject has become a subject of intense debate in several scholarly circles, as well as in the popular press. Having surveyed a rich historical record associating colonial and revolutionary leaders with native peoples and their sociopolitical systems, as well as a similarly rich trail of suggestions by eminent historians and other scholars that the idea is worth pursuing, Johansen and Grinde are mystified that some ethnohistorians and anthropologists in our own time can deny this record, usually without familiarizing themselves with it.
The work of the authors has convinced them that it is not a question of whether native societies helped shape the evolution of democracy in the colonies and early United States. It is a question of how this influence was conveyed and how pervasive it was.
The idea that the political systems of Native American societies helped shape democracy in the United States during its formative years may seem novel, even nonsensical, to anyone who has not studied the history of the time in archival sources. Our dominant culture certainly does not prepare us for the belief that our intellectual heritage is a combination of European and indigenous American ideas, nor that “life, liberty, and happiness” have Native American precedents. Perhaps, then, one ought to be able to understand people-even people with doctorates who dismiss the idea out of hand. Even if such people should know better than to prejudge the historical record, or to make up their minds before examining evidence, they, too, are but responding to the perceptual prison their culture has erected for them
Recommended from our members
Robert L. Berner's “Howlers”: A Reply
Robert L. Berner does not tell us whether he has actually read Exemplar of Liberty (1991), or whether he has merely fished through the book’s index in search of debating points. Berner’s latest rebuttal indicates that he has not read the book in its entirety. He complains, for example, that we have committed a “howler” by placing John Adams at the Constitutional Convention. The “howler” is actually Berner’s, because on page 199 of Exemplar of Liberty we write: “Although Adams had been selected as a Massachusetts delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he chose not to attend, and published his lengthy essay, Defence of the Constitutions of . . . the United States, instead.” Johansen’s wording in his first reply to Berner (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24:2) stating that Adams discussed such things “at the Constitutional Convention” could be misread. Had he completely read Exemplar, Berner would have understood that this was a reference to Adams’s book, not to his physical presence.
When Berner asserts that “No founding father knew what the Iroquois structure was,” he commits a rather astounding “howler”by writing out of the record Benjamin Franklin, who was probably the most influential founder of them all. It was Franklin who printed treaty accounts from 1736 to 1762, and who started his diplomatic career by attending Iroquois councils during the early 1750s. Franklin was present at the Constitutional Convention, and published actively in the Philadelphia press on questions of political theory. Thus, Berner cannot dismiss the influence idea by dismissing John Adams’s role. It was Franklin who merged European and Native American political precedents in his Albany Plan and Articles of Confederation