Democracy as it’s known at home and abroad has roots in Indigenous beliefs and customs practiced long before European settlers arrived. Award-winning authors Ned Blackhawk and Nicole Eustace will meet onstage to discuss how Indigenous groups like the Iroquois Confederacy helped shape the society we live in today.
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The story of our nation’s founding casts European settlers as a singular, heavily armed entity against whom America’s Indians stood no chance. In reality, Native People exerted enormous influence over relations among French, Dutch, and English newcomers. Before and after the American Revolution, Central New York and Eastern Canada’s Haudenosaunee-speaking Iroquois Confederacy were particularly prominent. The strength of the six nations’ alliance—based on a shared system of clans and chieftainships, representative councils, and governing practices—equipped them to survive threats and stake claim to economic, military, and political power that was global in reach. In his 2023 book, The Rediscovery of America, Ned Blackhawk recounts a group of elders’ 1701 diplomatic voyage to London and the portraits painted in their honor. “Iroquois affairs concerned European leaders so much that Iroquois leaders, not New France’s founder, would be invited to sit for portraiture,” he writes.
Powers granted to the new government by the American Constitution slowly sapped Indigenous tribes of theirs. Nonetheless, the enduring influence of the Haudenosaunee can’t be overstated. In her 2021 book, Covered with Night, Nicole Eustace writes of the Haudenosaunee and British-penned Treaty of 1722—the oldest continuously recognized treaty in U.S. law—which represented a pivotal turning point in world history in its eschewal of punitive justice precedented on European policy, in favor of a reparative form of justice advocated by the Haudenosaunee. Close correspondence between tribal leaders and people including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, meanwhile, reveals the extent to which American Democracy is indebted to the guidance and modeled governance of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Humanities New York welcomes Ned Blackhawk and Nicole Eustace for a conversation stemming from points of overlap in their work, which share in common the imperative to rewire the American imagination as it relates to Indigenous history. Eustace and Blackhawk will address the Haudenosaunee as power players in early U.S. history, no less significant than the “Founding Fathers” in their contributions to American democracy as we know it today.
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