Page 54 - ECOlogic Book

A New Place for Pan
(Fall, 1992)

I’m looking at a flier that came in the mail. It says, “Help Put Pan in Her
Place”. Pan who? Or did they mean Pam? Her picture shows a smiling,
crinkley-eyed woman who looks, well yes, a little like Mary Martin. She’s
running for the Michigan House of Representatives. Can this be? Can Peter
Pan really be running for public office? What will Tinker Bell say? I don’t
know Pan. Maybe you do. I don’t think I’ll go to her fund-raiser, as the
reality of meeting her might undo the fantasy this flier evokes. It did get my
attention. And it did, perhaps, give me what I’ve been searching for.

I’ve been needing a connecting thread for three themes I want to braid
together in this essay: the Columbus Quincentenial, the relationship
between the Iroquois Confederation and the United States Constitution, and
Women in Government.

So here we have a woman named Pan running for office in a year when
governments concern with ecological issues is desperately needed, yet none
of the presidential candidates is discussing them much. Besides the obvious
ecological connection with Pan, the Greek god of nature, is there a deeper
meaning to this?

Let’s start in 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue to “discover”
America. What he discovered was a vast untamed “wilderness”, though the
people he also found here did not consider it wilderness at all, but instead
had learned to live in harmony with its abundance. These people, he called
“Indians” not, by some accounts because he thought he had found a new
route to India, but because they were “the people In Dios”, in Spanish, “the
people in God.” So peacefully did they live, so generous were they in
temperament that it seemed to some Spaniards that they indeed must be
the people in Dios.

Columbus celebrated these observations by enslaving them, cutting off the
hands or feet of those who tried to escape, and by forcibly converting them
to Christianity. Contemporary Indians are anxious that this story be told,
especially during this year of Quincentenial hoopla. So I am telling it. But I
want to tell another story too; the little-known story of the Indian influence
on the framing of the U. S. Constitution, some 250 years after Columbus.

Americans are justifiably proud of our system of government which, while
admittedly flawed, appears to be the most viable in the world. We think of
54