American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Having now compiled roughly 1,325 items in my annotated bibliography of contentions regarding the Iroquois’ role in the development of democracy, I have become used to watching a large number of people bend the subject to fit their own biases as they accuse me of being a mythmaker. Professor Robert L. Berner seems irritated that I have acted as both advocate of the idea and compiler of a bibliography on the subject. Berner is welcome to tell me and the readers of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal just what my purported biases have compelled me to omit from my annotations. He has not identified any such faults in my account. Instead, he implies that I traffic in “dogma”while he dispenses objective truth. I have Berner in my record as a critic of my ideas, so he is probably as ideologically driven as he accuses me of being. Berner appears in my second volume of annotations as follows: 1992.002. Berner, Robert. “American Myth: Old, New, Yet Untold.” Genre: Fmms ofDiscourse & Culture 25:4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 377-389. Berner surveys the debate over Iroquois influence on the development of American democracy in the context of the intellectual ferment over the quincentenary of Columbus’ first landfall in America.