American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In “Notes from the ‘Culture Wars’: More Annotations on the Debate Regarding the Iroquois and the Origins of Democracy” (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23:1), Professor Bruce E. Johansen asserted the general proposition that the Iroquois influenced the development of American democracy and the particular claim that this development therefore must have included an Iroquois influence on the writing of the United States Constitution. When I replied to Johansen-in “Iroquois Influence: A Response to Bruce Johansen’s ‘Notes from the “Culture Wars”’ (Amm’canIndian Culture and Research Journal 24:2)-I neither denied nor affirmed the general proposition. My argument was only with the notion that the Iroquois example somehow served as a model for the Constitution, and I suggested that even if significant similarities could be found between the Constitution’s structuring of the federal government and the Iroquois model, particularly the way the League council formulated policy, those similarities would not mean much if no Founding Father knew what the Iroquois structure was. In his reply to my reply-“Data or Dogma? A Reply to Robert L. Berner” (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 242)-Johansen demands that I match his “data” with my own and suggests that I have ignored Exemplar of Liberty (1991), in which, he says, he and Donald Grinde Jr. have amassed “the historical evidence Berner complains we lack. . . .”