Thomas:
I have been deeply disturbed over the postings we have been engaged in. I
have spent many hours of my walks ruminating on postings by Ed Weike and Ray
Harrel and the themes of justice, injustice, governments, denial, cruelty to
the Natives, etc. At the basis my unease is my inner sense of myself as a
Canadian who has traveled a lot, read a lot and thought a lot about native
governance, spirituality, relationships with the land and with the white
man.
I am not European and the culture of Europe that the school system and the
political thought from Western civilization have tried to instil in me has
failed. I am North American from the tribe of Canadians. We are a new
grouping that has insinuated itself across the land called Canada. I am a
hybrid being. The land itself has spoken to me in my lifetime with it's
beauty, it's solitude, it's vastness and it's difficult climate and terrain.
As I have searched for myself, I have had to include those who came before
me in this land, The First Nations People, because we are sharing this
experience and it has formed them as it is forming me and my children.
We have taken from those before us, not only some of their land, but their
understandings of life, governance and spirituality and incorporated these
gifts into our tribe. The tribe of Americans have done the same. And yet,
in a curious lack, we have failed to honour that which we recieved and found
valuable. It is a denial of shame. We have not had the cathrarsis of
freeing the repressed guilt of the Western European actions that our
forebearers created by their actions against the land and it's original
inhabitants. We are in collective denial and individual denial of accepting
those gifts freely given by the people we have treated so badly. We also
have denied the grandeur of the land and animals and plant life that we
collectively share. We fear opening ourselves to the true possibilities
that would evolve if we accepted the co-existence of this place with all
that exists here.
There is a need ... to allow ourselves to grow. To relinguish the European,
the Asian, the Middle East from our identity. There is a need to
incorporate what we are - where we are and stand alone on those truth's.
Those who come from those other cultures - as my grandparents did, need to
make the paradigm shift from being half breeds, honouring cultures which we
no longer are part off and owning the cultures we have become and finally
including those who are our brothers - those who were here first - not just
the people, but the animals and the land and the fishes and the prairies and
the oceans and the sky. For this place is different. The vibrations of
this land are different and we collectively need to stop denying them by
holding onto other truths and embrace our own. We are the New World and the
Old World needs our unique contribution. The question is; can we accecpt
our heritage and become what those before us - in their highest achievements
exemplified and then add what we are to that potential?
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
-- The Co-Intelligence Institute CII home // Y2K home // CIPolitics home
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American Indians: The original democrats
Many people think that our democratic tradition evolved primarily from the
Greeks and the English. But those political cultures, steeped in slavery,
aristocracy, and property-power, provided only a counterpoint to the real
source of our federal democracy - the American Indians. In the following
selections from his book Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas
Transformed the World (Crown Publishers, NY, 1988), Jack Weatherford looks
into the historic record to correct the mythology we have been raised with.
-- Tom Atlee
The most consistent theme in the descriptions penned about the New World was
amazement at the Indians' personal liberty, in particular their freedom from
rulers and from social classes based on ownership of property. For the first
time the French and the British became aware of the possibility of living in
social harmony and prosperity without the rule of a king. As the first
reports of this new place filtered into Europe, they provoked much
philosophical and political writing. Sir Thomas More incorporated into his
1516 book Utopia those characteristics then being reported by the first
travelers to America.... More's work was translated into all the major
European languages.... Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan, wrote
several short books on the Huron Indians of Canada based on his stay with
them from 1683 to 1694 [during which he] found an orderly society, but one
lacking a formal government that compelled such order....
Soon thereafter, Lahontan became an international celebrity feted in all the
liberal circles. The playwright Delisle de la Drevetiere adapted these ideas
to the stage in a play about an American Indian's visit to Paris... Arlequin
Sauvage,.... which had a major impact on a young man named Jean Jacques
Rousseau.... and eventually led to the publication of his best-known work,
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, in 1754.... During this era the
thinkers of Europe forged the ideas that became known as the European
Enlightenment, and much of its light came from the torch of Indian
liberty....
When the American Revolution started, [Thomas] Paine served as secretary to
the commissioners sent to negotiate with the Iroquois.... [He] sought to
learn their language and throughout the remainder of his political and
writing career he used the Indians as models of how society might be
organized. - pp. 122-125 Reportedly, the first person to propose a union
of all the colonies and to propose a federal model for it was the Iroquois
chief Canassatego, speaking at an Indian-British assembly in Pennsylvania in
July 1744.... He suggested that they do as his people had done and form a
union like the League of the Iroquois....
Benjamin Franklin...[was] Indian commissioner...during the 1750s and became
intimately familiar with the intracacies of Indian political culture and in
particular with the League of the Iroquois..... Speaking to the Albany
Congress in 1754, Franklin called on the delegates of the various English
colonies to unite and emulate the Iroquois League.... This model of several
sovereign units united into one government presented precisely the solution
to the problem confronting the writers of the United Sates Constitution.
Today we call this a "federal" system in which each state retains power over
internal affiars and the national government regulates affairs common to
all.... The Americans followed the Iroquois precedent[s] of always
providing for ways to remove leaders when necessary .....admitting new
states as members rather than keeping them as colonies....allowing only one
person to speak at a time in political meetings.... One of the most
important political institutions borrowed from the Indians was the
caucus....The word comes from the Algonquian languages..... The caucus
became a mainstay of American democracy both in the Congress and in
political and community groups all over the country. - pp. 135-145
