American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Since the early 1990s, I have kept a running bibliography of commentary on assertions that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and other Native American confederacies helped shape ideas of democracy in the early United States and Europe. By late 1995, the bibliography had reached 120 tightly packed pages, roughly 550 items from more than 130 books, as well as newspaper articles and book reviews numbering in the hundreds, academic journals, films, speeches, documentaries, and other sources. The bibliography was assembled with the help of friends (especially John Kahionhes Fadden and Donald Grinde), searches of libraries and bookstores, and personal involvement in various skirmishes of the debate. The number of references exploded during 1995, in large part because I began to use computer-aided searches of databases, such as LEXIS, which allows nearly instant access (using a legal-style key-word system) to most of the major newspapers in the United States, Canada, and England.