In FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS, Bruce Johansen has written an exciting book that broadens the basis of American history.
Calling on Benjamin Franklin as his chief witness, Dr. Johansen shows how the primitive, but surprisingly democratic and enlightened culture of
the American Indian, clarified the thinking of immigrant colonists and even of
the world beyond our shores -- a world tired of the elaborate hierarchies of
kings and nobles and the inherited miseries of their subjects. To the European,
America was another planet. Franklin saw in it the shadow of an imperfect but
practical Utopia.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Six Nations of the
Iroquois were our allies in England's war with France. They may be seen as the
friends and equals of our Colonial statesmen. On both sides, there were those
who spoke the other's language fluently. White man and red man sat together
around the Indian Council fires and the record of what they said exists today.
from the Introduction:
This book has two major purposes. First, it seeks to weave a few new
threads into the tapestry of American revolutionary history, to begin the
telling of a larger story that has lain largely forgotten, scattered around dusty
archives, for more than two centuries. By arguing that American Indians
(principally the Iroquois) played a major role in shaping the ideas of Franklin
(and thus, the American Revolution) I do not mean to demean or denigrate
European influences. I mean not to subtract from the existing record, but to
add an indigenous aspect, to show how America has been a creation of all its
peoples.
In the telling, this story also seeks to demolish what remains of
stereotypical assumptions that American Indians were somehow too simpleminded
to engage in effective social and political organization. No one may doubt any
longer that there has been more to history, much more, than the simple
opposition of "savagery" and "civilization." History's popular
writers have served us with many kinds of savages, noble and vicious,
"good Indians" and "bad Indians," nearly always as beings
too preoccupied with the essentials of the hunt to engage in philosophy and
statecraft.
This was simply not the case. Franklin and his fellow founders knew
differently. They learned from American Indians, by assimilating into their
vision of the future, aspects of American Indian wisdom and beauty. Our task is
to relearn history as they experienced it, in all its richness and complexity,
and thereby to arrive at a more complete understanding of what we were, what we
are, and what we may become.
from Chapter 3, Our Indians Have Outdone the Romans:
The Iroquois' extension of liberty and political participation to women
surprised some eighteenth-century Euro-American observers. An unsigned
contemporary manuscript in the New York State Library reported that when
Iroquois men returned from hunting, they turned everything they had caught over
to the women. "Indeed, every possession of the man except his horse &
his rifle belong to the woman after marriage; she takes care of their Money and
Gives it to her husband as she thinks his necessities require it," the
unnamed observer wrote. The writer sought to refute assumptions that Iroquois
women were "slaves of their husbands." "The truth is that Women
are treated in a much more respectful manner than in England & that they
possess a very superior power; this is to be attributed in a very great measure
to their system of Education." The women, in addition to their political
power and control of allocation from the communal stores, acted as
communicators of culture between generations. It was they who educated the
young.
Another matter that surprised
many contemporary observers was the Iroquois' sophisticated use of oratory.
Their excellence with the spoken word, among other attributes, often caused
Colden and others to compare the Iroquois to the Romans and Greeks.
