Stealing from the Iroquois

Re: The place of indigenous peoples in New World history

The U.S. has forgotten the tight connection between its “founding fathers” and the Iroquois—the native foundation on which its nationality was erected. The Boston “tea party” of 1773 was not the one-shot, Halloween-style dress-up in Mohawk costume, that it is understood to be today. As the 1770s began, rebellious settlers drew more and more on their New World experience for identity and inspiration. In fact, an Iroquois vogue, in idea and style, swept the Anglo colonies before their break with Europe. Never mind that the relationship with the natives was tortured—that the patriots failed to understand the natives’ spiritual world and held the indigenous lifestyle in contempt. When they needed an identity symbol to pit themselves as “Americans” against a European establishment, they were quick to adopt the scrappy figure of the very people they themselves had been bullying since the day of arrival.

An engraving published a dozen years before the outbreak of fighting depicts the Anglo colonist as an American native, struggling under the weight of taxes that were imposed by Britain to pay for the settlers’ defense from the French and the natives being impersonated here. In 1766, after the Stamp Act was repealed, patriot Paul Revere designed an obelisk for the rebels and their cause that radiates borrowed native symbolism. Erected in Boston and internally lighted by hundreds of lanterns, it depicted the course of affairs in three oiled-paper panels, like a modern newspaper cartoon:

A native (the colonist) first lies helpless under a pine tree (the Iroquois national symbol) as two British villains approach, one carrying a chain, the other appearing as a devilish flying creature that carries the Stamp Act in its claw. In the second panel, a Liberty goddess (a creature of the Enlightenment) blows a trumpet and the villains are in retreat, driven by a cloudburst. In the third, an eagle feeds its young atop a “Liberty tree. ” Later, this clone of the Iroquois “Eagle That Sees Far” (perched symbolically atop the Iroquois “Tree of Peace” and holding five arrows for the five nations of the League) would become the rebels’ eagle grasping 13 arrows: the first national symbol.

The U.S. instruments of government owe the Iroquois a debt too. Benjamin Franklin, from his perch at the edge of the frontier, was not only an instigator of the Iroquois vogue but the main importer of Iroquois principles. He is remembered a little for his Albany Plan for union, acknowledged as vaguely Iroquois-influenced but ultimately, in the wisdom of the founders, rejected in favor the (real) Constitution. There is no popular sense at all today of the full Indian-talking Franklin, who wore the Covenant Chain of treaties with the Iroquois as an amulet around his neck, or of the climate in which he could do so.

In full, this Philadelphian was maybe the last best hope for the kind of “brotherly love” relationship between peoples that William Penn had stitched together here at the start, immediately unraveled by the next generation. Had the brotherhood model succeeded (where natives are concerned), Franklin’s role would compose an inspiring chapter in the resulting folk myth, rememberable today under some such heading as “Ben Franklin and the Indians.”

It would start with Franklin carrying his Iroquois-inspired platform to the big Albany, N.Y., congress in 1754, winning delegates’ approval there for a uniform trade and treaty policy and regulation of the traders. In the plan, under his urging, the colonies would keep “independence of each other, and separate interests, tho' among a people united by common manners, language and, I may say, religion. . . ." In other words, they would follow the Iroquois arrangement—what today is known as “federalism,” a style of limited government unknown in Europe to that time, invented by native Americans to accommodate the characteristically native insistence on autonomy.

Borrowed from the Iroquois also:
~Decision by consensus: One colony could veto any action.
~A “Grand Council” that was unicameral, like its Iroquois model and unlike the two-house British Parliament.
~A Grand Council that, like the native “Great Council,” elected a “speaker,” the Iroquois term—retained today in the “speaker” of the U.S. “House of Representatives.”

Possibly Iroquois-influenced, too, was the uneven distribution of representatives to the Colonial Grand Council and their number, 48 (Iroquois, 50).

Too visionary, the Albany Plan flopped because legislators at home thought it limiting and the British king thought it liberating. After 20 more years, several wars all-round and assorted efforts by Britain to shorten the leash, colonists were ready to try for union again. And Franklin, presenting their case overseas, was still walking and talking Iroquois-style, using his Covenant Chain necklace as a visual aid to explain colonists’ intentions. His characteristic admonition, “Keep bright the chain,” was memorialized on an engraved silver cream beaker given him in London by friends.

Back from England in 1775, Franklin reheated the Albany Plan in his draft for “a firm league of friendship,” and its Iroquois ideas were largely incorporated in the colonies’ first “Articles of Confederation.” Among those that survived to grace the U.S. instruments still in use today was a provision for amendments, like the Iroquois League’s provision for new measures that could be “added to the rafters” of the symbolic longhouse meeting place. Federal to a fault, like the Iroquois’ own instrument, the first Articles of the colonial tribes lacked a practical authority to tax—a feature that might delight today’s U.S. conservatives had it been enacted.

{Adapted from Looking for the Bahana, © 2008}