Page 55 - ECOlogic Book

our constitution as having been handed down to us by divine fiat. In fact,
students of those early days of the constitution’s development marvel that it
ever got off the ground at all. They know that parts of it harkened back to
the democracy of ancient Greece, and the constitutional convention was
fraught with dissension and difficulty. What is not so well known is the
importance of the influence on its design by the Iroquois Confederation.

For centuries before Columbus opened up a new real estate venture for
Europe in the Western hemisphere, the Iroquois, (Haw de no sau nee), a
federation of six Indian nations, had been practicing a form of democratic
governance unlike any known in the world to that time. The six nations,
Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora, had joined
together to form a confederacy based on the Great Law of Peace from the
great Huron prophet, “The Peacemaker”, which was given to them by
Hiawatha – (yes, Virginia, there really was a Hiawatha) and his partner,
Jigonsaseh, the “Mother of Nations”.

When scholars recently began to study this “Great Binding Law”, they saw
parallels to the U.S. Articles of Confederation and Constitution. Upon further
study, it became clear to them that our two founding documents were
actually modeled after the Great Law, (something Indian elders have always
known). The founding fathers, we now know, not only socialized with the
Indians who were all around them, they actually attended the Iroquois
councils and invited them to attend the Constitutional Convention as
advisors.

The framers of the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution had a
model of Democracy from the ancient Greeks, but they had no model of a
confederacy to bring together the thirteen colonies. For that, they turned to
the Iroquois. They studied the Great Law, borrowing from it freely and
explicitly for the organizing principles in our founding documents.

Benjamin Franklin had set type for Indian treaties for nearly twenty years,
and in 1751, he wrote, “It would be a very strange thing if six nations of
ignorant savages should be able to form a scheme for such a union and be
able to execute it in such a manner as it has subsisted for ages and appears
indissoluble, and yet like union should be impractical for ten or a dozen
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English colonies.”

60 Dr. Brice Johansen, author of The Forgotten Founders, believes Franklin’s use of the phrase “ignorant
savages” was intended as satire. A study of Franklin’s friendly and respectful relationship with the Iroquois bears
this out.

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