01 June 2009
Native American Ideas of Governance and U.S. Constitution
By Bruce E. Johansen
Bruce E. Johansen is the Frederick W. Kayser Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. With co-author Donald A. Grinde Jr. he pioneered the once-controversial, now widely accepted research on the significant influence of indigenous American government practices on the Constitution of the United States.
Besides well-known European precedents — from Greece, Rome, and English common law, among others — indigenous American ideas of democracy have shaped the government of the United States. Immigrants arrived in colonial America seeking freedom and found it in the confederacies of the Iroquois and other Native nations. By the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, these ideas were common currency in the former colonies, illustrated in debates involving Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Later, during the 19th century, conceptions of Iroquois gender relations had an important impact on major architects of American feminism. These ideas illuminate political debates today.
Throughout eastern North America, Native nations had formed confederacies by the time they encountered European immigrants: the Seminoles in what is now Florida, the Cherokees and Choctaws in the Carolinas, and the Iroquois and their allies the Wyandots (Hurons) in upstate New York and the Saint Lawrence Valley.
The Iroquois system of confederation was the best-known to the colonists, in large part because the Iroquois occupied a pivotal position in diplomacy, not only between the English and French but also among other native confederacies. Called the Iroquois by the French and the Five (later Six) Nations by the English, the Iroquois peoples, who call themselves Haudenosaunee “People of the Longhouse,” controlled the only relatively level land pass between the English colonies on the eastern seaboard and the French settlements in the Saint Lawrence Valley.
The Iroquois Confederacy was formed by the Huron leader Deganawidah, “the Peacemaker” in Haudenosaunee oral tradition, who enlisted the aid of Aiowantha (sometimes called Hiawatha) to spread his vision of a confederacy to control bloody rivalries. The confederacy originally included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The sixth nation, the Tuscaroras, migrated into Iroquois country in the early 18th century and were adopted. The confederacy probably dates from the 12th century of the Common Era, according to research by Barbara A. Mann and Jerry Fields of the University of Toledo.
Haudenosaunee fundamental law, the Great Law of Peace, stipulates to this day that sachems’ (chiefs’) skins must be thick to withstand the criticism of their constituents: sachems should take pains not to become angry when people scrutinize their conduct in governmental affairs. Such a point of view pervades the writings of Jefferson and Franklin, although it was not fully codified into U.S. law until the Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) made it virtually impossible for public officials to sue successfully for libel.
The Great Law of Peace also provides for the removal from office of leaders who can no longer adequately function in office, a measure remarkably similar to a constitutional amendment adopted in the United States during the late 20th century providing for the removal of an incapacitated president. The Great Law includes provisions guaranteeing freedom of religion and the right of redress before the Grand Council. It forbids unauthorized entry of homes — all measures that sound familiar to U.S. citizens through the Bill of Rights.
The procedure for debating policies of the confederacy begins with the Mohawks and Senecas, called “elder brothers.” After being debated by the Keepers of the Eastern Door (Mohawks) and the Keepers of the Western Door (Senecas), the question is thrown “across the fire” to the Oneida and Cayuga statesmen, “younger brothers,” for discussion. Once consensus is achieved among the Oneidas and the Cayugas, the discussion returns to the Senecas and Mohawks for confirmation. Next, the question is laid before the Onondagas, who try to resolve any remaining conflicts.
At this stage, the Onondagas exercise a power similar to judicial review and functions built into conference committees in the U.S. Congress. They can raise objections about the proposal if it is believed to be inconsistent with the Great Law. Essentially, the council can rewrite the proposed law so that it can be in accord with the constitution of the Iroquois. When the Onondagas reach consensus, the Tadodaho, the chief executive officer of the Grand Council, confirms the decision. This process reflects the emphasis on checks and balances, public debate, and consensus. The overall intent of such a parliamentary procedure is to encourage unity at each step.
The Iroquois and Colonial Federation
At Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1744, Canassatego, the Iroquois Tadodaho, advised colonial representatives on Iroquois concepts of unity:
“Our wise forefathers established Union and Amity between the Five Nations. This has made us formidable; this has given us great Weight and Authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy; and by your observing the same methods, our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire such Strength and power. Therefore whatever befalls, never fall out with one another.”
Benjamin Franklin probably first learned of Canassatego’s advice to the colonies as he set the sachem’s words in type. Franklin’s press issued Indian treaties in small booklets that enjoyed a lively sale throughout the colonies, from 1736 to 1762. Even before the Albany Congress, the first attempt to unify the colonies, Benjamin Franklin had been musing over the words of Canassatego. Using Iroquois examples of unity, Franklin sought to shame the reluctant colonists into some form of union in 1751 when he engaged in a hyperbolic racial slur: “It would be a strange thing … if Six Nations of Ignorant savages should be capable of forming such an union and be able to execute it in such a manner that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble, and yet that a like union should be impractical for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous.” Actually, subsequent evidence shows that Franklin had a healthy respect for the Iroquois. He began his distinguished diplomatic career by representing Pennsylvania in treaty councils with the Iroquois and their allies, as he became a forceful advocate of colonial union.
On July 10, 1754, Franklin formally proposed his Plan of Union before the Albany Congress. Franklin wrote that the debates on the Albany Plan “... went on daily, hand in hand with the Indian business.” The Iroquois sachem Tiyanoga not only spoke for the roughly 200 Indians in attendance at the Albany Congress but also briefed the colonial delegates on Iroquois political systems, much as Canassatego had done 10 years earlier.
In drawing up his final draft of the Albany Plan for colonial unification, Franklin was meeting several diplomatic demands: the British, for control; the colonies, for autonomy in a loose confederation; and the Iroquois, for a colonial union similar to their own in form and function. For the British, the plan provided administration by a president general appointed by England. The individual colonies were to be allowed to retain their own constitutions, except as the plan circumscribed them. The retention of internal sovereignty within the individual colonies closely resembled the Iroquois system and had no existing precedent in Europe.
Thomas Jefferson and Native American Concepts of Governance
While Franklin and Jefferson were too pragmatic to believe that they could copy the “natural state,” its image was sewn early into the United States’ national ideological fabric. Jefferson wrote: “The only condition on earth to be compared with ours, in my opinion, is that of the Indian, where they have still less law than we.” When Thomas Paine wrote, on the first page of his influential pamphlet Common Sense, that “government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence,” he was recapitulating observations of Native American societies.
Writing to Edward Carrington in 1787, Jefferson linked freedom of expression with public opinion and happiness, citing American Indian societies as an example:
The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, our very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter …. I am convinced that those societies [as the Indians] which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments.
“Without government” could not have meant without social order to Jefferson. He, Franklin, and Paine all knew native societies too well to argue that Native Americans functioned without social cohesion. It was clear that the Iroquois, for example, did not organize a confederacy with alliances spreading over much of northeastern North America “without government.” They did it, however, with a non-European conception of government, one of which Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin were appreciative students who sought to factor “natural law” and “natural rights” into their designs for the United States during the revolutionary era.
A Debate Regarding Federalism at the Constitutional Convention
By June of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were engaged in a debate about the fundamental nature of the Union. Many delegates appeared to agree with James Wilson when he stated, on June 1, 1787, that he would not be “governed by the British model which was inapplicable to … this country.” Wilson believed that America’s size was so great and its ideals so “republican, that nothing but a great confederated republic would do for it.”
In 1787, on the eve of the Constitutional Convention, John Adams published his A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. Although Adams was selected as a Massachusetts delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he chose not to attend and published his lengthy essay instead. Adams’s Defence was a critical survey of world governments that included a description of the Iroquois and other Native American governments and other historical examples of confederacies in Europe and Asia.
Adams’s Defence was no unabashed endorsement of native models for government. He refuted the arguments of Franklin, who advocated a one-house legislature resembling the Iroquois Grand Council, a model that had been used in the Albany Plan and Articles of Confederation. Adams did not trust the consensus model that seemed to work for the Iroquois. Adams believed that without the checks and balances built into two houses, the system would succumb to special interests and dissolve into anarchy, or despotism. When Adams described the Mohawks’ independence, he exercised criticism, while Franklin wrote about Indian governments in a much more approving way.
Native American Ideas and the Origins of American Feminism
An aspect of Native American life that alternately intrigued, perplexed, and sometimes alarmed European and European-American observers, most of whom were male, during the 17th and 18th centuries, was the influential role of women. In many cases they hold pivotal positions in Native political systems. Iroquois women, for example, nominate men to positions of leadership and can “dehorn,” or impeach, them for misconduct. Women often have veto power over 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.
The role of women in Iroquois society inspired some of the most influential advocates of modern feminism in the United States. The Iroquois example figures importantly in a seminal book in what Sally R. Wagner calls “the first wave of feminism,” Matilda Joslyn Gage’s Woman, Church, and State (1893). In that book, Gage acknowledges, according to Wagner’s research, that “the modern world [is] indebted [to the Iroquois] for its first conception of inherent rights, natural equality of condition, and the establishment of a civilized government upon this basis.”
Gage was one of the 19th century’s three most influential American feminists, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Gage herself was admitted to the Iroquois Council of Matrons and was adopted into the Wolf Clan, with the name Karonienhawi, “she who holds [up] the sky.”
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
