American Indian Culture and Research Journal

After fifteen years examining the native roots of American democracy, the authors have been intrigued, sometimes mystified, and often surprised as the subject has become a subject of intense debate in several scholarly circles, as well as in the popular press. Having surveyed a rich historical record associating colonial and revolutionary leaders with native peoples and their sociopolitical systems, as well as a similarly rich trail of suggestions by eminent historians and other scholars that the idea is worth pursuing, Johansen and Grinde are mystified that some ethnohistorians and anthropologists in our own time can deny this record, usually without familiarizing themselves with it. The work of the authors has convinced them that it is not a question of whether native societies helped shape the evolution of democracy in the colonies and early United States. It is a question of how this influence was conveyed and how pervasive it was. The idea that the political systems of Native American societies helped shape democracy in the United States during its formative years may seem novel, even nonsensical, to anyone who has not studied the history of the time in archival sources. Our dominant culture certainly does not prepare us for the belief that our intellectual heritage is a combination of European and indigenous American ideas, nor that “life, liberty, and happiness” have Native American precedents. Perhaps, then, one ought to be able to understand people-even people with doctorates who dismiss the idea out of hand. Even if such people should know better than to prejudge the historical record, or to make up their minds before examining evidence, they, too, are but responding to the perceptual prison their culture has erected for them.