Head on a pike...

[WC_lun]

Yay for false equelevencies! No, they are not the same. Also, if you truly felt for those children, you would see this is the proper thing to do. For all intensive purposes they are American and they are contributing members of our society or they do not get the chance to get 2 year work visas or the chance to become us citizens. I know this will be difficult, but maybe seperate your hate for Obama and the good of this decision.

 

[billc]

I don't hate anyone WC lun. Here is a question. You find a family of ILLEGAL immigrants. Mom, Dad, and three kids. Do mom and dad get deported but 2 of the three kids ages 15 and 16 get to stay? How will they be cared for if they insist on staying? This grab for votes has created a major problem that just made the situation more, not less complicated.

 

[billc]

Yes elder, they were truly a peaceful people...

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101005045424AAsRWcF

Of all the North American Indian tribes, the seventeenth-century Iroquois are the most renowned for their cruelty towards other human beings. Scholars know that they ruthlessly tortured war prisoners and that they were cannibals; in the Algonquin tongue the word Mohawk actually means "flesh-eater." There is even a story that the Indians in neighboring Iroquois territory would flee their homes upon sight of just a small band of Mohawks. Ironically, the Iroquois were not alone in these practices. There is ample evidence that most, if not all, of the Indians of northeastern America engaged in cannibalism and torture—there is documentation of the Huron, Neutral, and Algonquin tribes each exhibiting the same behavior. This paper will examine these atrocities, search through several possible explanations, and ultimately reveal that the practices of cannibalism and torture in the Iroquois were actually related.

Then there is this about the Iroquois...

http://www.ohio.edu/orgs/glass/vol/1/14.htm

It is also important to establish that the practices of the Iroquois were more than the exaggeration and hearsay of excitable Frenchmen. The Iroquois surely performed torture upon war captives; many European settlers viewed first-hand the mutilated body-parts of war captives. However, there has been some doubt in the current century that cannibalism was really practiced by the Iroquois. Anthropologist W. Arens proposed in 1979 that there were no first-hand accounts of flesh eating among the Native Americans, and thus no solid proof for cannibalism. This controversial view has been refuted since, for there is indeed ample evidence in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents alone to prove Arens’s thesis wrong. With this assertion in mind, it is now possible to inquire why the Native Americans performed these appalling acts.

The death of family members had a profound psychological effect upon the Iroquois, thus they required strong measures to relieve themselves of sadness. Essentially, they felt that they needed restitution in some form or another for the dead relative. Grieving matriarchs petitioned the tribe’s warriors to retrieve captives from an offending tribe. The Iroquois warriors then established a raid solely to gather captives; scholars call this practice "mourning-wars." According to Anthony Wallace, the grieving Iroquois could find restitution in one of three ways. The first was for a warrior to bring back the scalp of an Indian from the killer’s tribe and to present it to the grieving person. Though the scalp represented a captive, live prisoners were preferred. The other two options involved a live captive: the Iroquois either vengefully tortured the prisoner to death or adopted him or her into the tribe. Since the Iroquois were a matriarchal society, the mourning woman would ultimately decide the fate of those captives that were brought to the village, mostly based upon the amount of grief that she felt for her dead relation.

The Jesuits Relations, The Explorations of Radisson, and Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison offer other detailed descriptions of Iroquois atrocities, but generally the torture followed the same pattern. First the victorious Iroquois warriors would mangle the prisoners’ hands; they did this by pulling out the captives’ fingernails and/or cutting off some of their fingers. The victors usually subjected the prisoners to a heavy beating at the same time. Thereafter the Iroquois took the captives to their village and subjected the men to the gantlet (or gauntlet). They then humbled those who survived in a number of ways; for example the Iroquois might strip them naked in front of the village and force them to sing and dance. This process always ended either in a slow death by fire and scalping or with adoption into the Iroquois village. The Iroquois tortured only men to death when they weren’t adopted; they either killed quickly women and children who were unadopted.
There are definitely reasons behind this torture that do not extend into metaphysical domains. The initial beating obviously broke the spirits of the captive and ensured submission. The act of battering prisoners to break their will is no isolated policy of the Iroquois alone, but of nearly every race throughout history. At this time the Iroquois also mangled a prisoner’s hands, a brutality performed so that the captive could no longer wield a weapon. After returning to their village, the Iroquois used the gantlet to further break the spirits of the captives and to serve as a test of endurance and physical tolerance. The Iroquois would execute without ceremony those captives who fell and did not get up, which indicates disdain for mental and physical weakness. Indeed, the Iroquois expected even those captives who underwent subsequent lethal torture to stand strong and not cry out—the warriors would disgustedly dispatch a captive who lost his composure. As the night went by and the prisoner remained silent, the entire tribe would become more and more frenzied until the sun came up and the prisoner was killed. Thus it seems that torturing captives to death was a ritualized act of vengeance that was truly fulfilled only when its objective (making the victim respond to the torture) failed!

Hmmm...at least they didn't have prison's...

 

[CanuckMA]

Yes elder, they were truly a peaceful people...

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101005045424AAsRWcF



Then there is this about the Iroquois...

http://www.ohio.edu/orgs/glass/vol/1/14.htm

You seriously want to take on Elder999 on things Native Americans???

opcorn::drinkbeer

 

[billc]

And there were these gentle native people...

The practice of human sacrifice was widespread in the Mesoamerican and in the South American cultures during the Inca Empire.[SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][6][/SUP] Like all other known pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica, the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice. The extant sources describe how the Aztecs sacrificed human victims on each of their eighteen festivities, one festivity for each of their 20-day months.[SUP][7][/SUP] It is unknown if the Aztecs engaged in human sacrifice before they reached the Anahuac valley and started absorbing other cultural influences. The first human sacrifice reported in the sources was the sacrifice and skinning of the daughter of the king Cóxcox of Culhuacán;

The sacrifice ritual

Most of the sacrificial rituals took more than two people to perform. In the usual procedure of the ritual, the sacrifice would be taken to the top of the temple.[SUP][36][/SUP] The sacrifice would then be laid on a stone slab by four priests, and his/her abdomen would be sliced open by a fifth priest with a ceremonial knife made of flint. The cut was made in the abdomen and went through the diaphragm. The priest would grab the heart and tear it out, still beating. It would be placed in a bowl held by a statue of the honored god, and the body thrown down the temple's stairs.[SUP][37][/SUP]
Before and during the killing, priests and audience (who gathered in the plaza below) stabbed, pierced and bled themselves as autosacrifice (Sahagun, Bk. 2: 3: 8, 20: 49, 21: 47). Hymns, whistles, spectacular costumed dances and percussive music marked different phases of the rite.

And these gentle people...

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081124013456AA7Kxv9

And apparently they did own some property...

http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/history/indianslaves.htm

Beginning with the Tlingit, slavery as an institution existed among all the northwest coast Indians as far as California. It practically ceased with south Oregon, although the Hupa, of Athapascan stock, and the Nozi (Yanan), both of northern California, practiced it to some extent, according to Powers. Among the former, a bastard became the slave for life of one of the male relatives of the mother and was compelled to perform menial service; nor could he or she marry a free person. Such slaves seem to have been entitled to purchase freedom, provided they could accumulate sufficient wealth. Both the Klamath and the Modoc seem to have had slavery in some form. The Klamath word for slave is lugsh, from luktha, 'to carry a load,' indicating that the slaves were the carriers of the tribe (Gatschet). The institution had found its way up Columbia River also, at least as far as Walla Walla River, where it was known to the Cayuse of Waiilatpuan, and to the Nez Percé of Shahaptian stock. From the west coast it appears to have passed far into the interior, where it was practiced, probably in a much modified form, by the Indians of the Mackenzie river region. It is said that the Etchareottine were called Awokànak, 'slaves', by their Cree neighbors, an epithet which in its French and Indian forms came to be the name (Slave or Slavey) under which they are best known.​

And these propertyless people seemed to have a whole system of ownership of property...

The Aztec economy can be divided into a political sector, under the control of nobles and kings, and a commercial sector that operated independently of the political sector. The political sector of the economy centered on the control of land and labor by kings and nobles. Nobles owned all land, and commoners got access to farmland and other fields through a variety of arrangements, from rental through sharecropping to serf-like labor and slavery. These payments from commoners to nobles supported both the lavish lifestyles of the high nobility and the finances of city-states. Many luxury goods were produced for consumption by nobles. The producers of featherwork, sculptures, jewelry, and other luxury items were full-time commoner specialists who worked for noble patrons.

And back to the North East coast...

After they captured a handful of Iroquois in battle, these "friendly" tribes proceeded to torture the captives to death. They burned the body of one captive Iroquois then poured water on him in cycles so that his flesh would fall off his body. When they had finally killed him and threw his innards into the river, the Indians told Champlain that this act was done in vengeance for their own mutilated tribesmen. There is mention in

 

[billc]

It appears that the Iroquios were a family oriented people as well...

The warriors were not the only ones who conducted the torture, however; the women and children of the village had just as much of an active role as the men did. While the captives were perched upon the scaffold, the children of the tribe would jab at the prisoner’s feet with knives. In addition to this, every person in the village took turns with the burning torches during the night ritual. In fact, the rest of the tribe would scorn anyone who did not partake in the torture as a weak and lazy individual.

You were saying elder...

Originally Posted by elder999
You know, you're right. Things were so much simpler for those first illegal immigrants-I mean, colonists-to land on these shores.....

Except for the torture, raiding, slavery, human sacrifice and cannibalism, they were a peaceful people without prisons, theft, or private property...:angel:

Funny, that guy John Fire Lame Deer sort of sounds like that guy, Baghdad Bob from the Iraqi war, you know, the guy who said the Americans weren't anywhere around, as he was being surrounded by the Americans...

From wikipedia, apparently the Lakota had some problems with other gentle people, though finding particulars is very difficult...

Conflicts withAnishnaabe and Cree peoples pushed the Lakota west onto the Great Plains in the mid- to late-17th century.[SUP][1][/SUP]

Conflicts...hmmm...but...but they were a peaceful people who didn't have property...what did they have "conflicts" about...


Apparently the Iroquois had a very liberal adoption policy as well...

This process always ended either in a slow death by fire and scalping or with adoption into the Iroquois village. The Iroquois tortured only men to death when they weren’t adopted; they either killed quickly women and children who were unadopted.

 

[billc]

Please, the early Americans were people. They were prone to all the evils that people of that time period were prone to and no more or no less than that. The deification of the early Americans isn't necessary. See them as human beings and you'll understand them completely. They may even have put heads on pikes. (See how I brought this all back to the first post...)

 

[elder999]

Yes elder, they were truly a peaceful people...

It's important to note that the founders based our government and its checks and balances on the Iroquois Confederacy, but who said anything about "peace?" Surely not I...:lol:

I have a Mohawk friend I haven't seen in years, Russell by name. Back in New York, a few of us were in a bar/restaurant, having drinks and appetizers, and Russell ordered steamed clams on the half shell-when they arrived they were liberally garnished with diced tomatoes and onions. Russell went red in the face, and was seriously ready to murder[ the waitress over the tomatoes and onions. I told him to calm down, and he was ready to murder me: Don't tell me to calm down! he shouted. Then, as quickly as I could say, Russell, you don't have to eat the tomatoes, you can just brush them off-he said, Oh, yeah-and the red went out of his face, and he was completely calm.

"Mohawk," means "people of the flint," to Mohawks-to lots of other people in what became New York, it meant people who eat people.

Dad always joked that my New York relatives were the reason natives got such a bad shake everywhere else: people would show up someplace new, and the natives would come over the hill to meet them, and they'd get all INDIANS!!!! OMG!! :lol:

You know, this post reminded me of something; once, a whole school bus's worth of kids wound up on my lawn to see me fight. The fight was broken up by my dad arriving from work, and standing there in his clerical collar, with his briefcase in one hand, and a raincoat draped over his arm, my dad talked about fighting, and said,I fight to kill.

I took a lot of ribbing for that for years-think I was about 13 when it happened, maybe 12, but I think dad was saying it for me.

Once, I killed-I've posted about it before. People always seem to think I should be bothered by it, when, the fact is.....

....I liked it.

Oh, not enough to seek the experience again, or join the police department-I did try to join the service-I got into Annapolis, but they wouldn't have me because of my medical history, and maybe that was a blessing. There has never been a pleasure that was quite equal to killing that boy, though: some things, like the birth of my children, have been better, and some things don't quite measure up: if I were able to choose between sex and killing a person, I'd take sex. Pizza, though? If it meant never having pizza-or sushi, or pancakes, or ice cream again-ever, in order to kill someone-to have their blood splash my face and to watch all that they were go right out of their eyes, I'd gladly choose to eviscerate someone with a teaspoon, and never have the pleasure of pizza again..

My grandfather was some sort of proto-Rambo in WWI, though-and promptly entered seminary when he returned. My dad was a priest, my grandfather was a priest, and my great grandfather was a minister, as well as a sailor. ANother ancestor was some sort of cavalry badaass in the Civil War, and wound up being a minister afterward. I could have been a priest-there's a very special provision in my family's trust for men who chose to join the clergy, and I have my own ideas as to why, and I think it has everything to do with avoiding taking life-or having anyone anger is enough to do so-but I chose another way-funny enough, I wound up being a sort of minister, but hey......


In any case, sure, my relatives and ancestors killed and tortured, and occasionally ate the organs of slain enemies,
like Magua in The Last of the Mohicans.

What that means, to me anyway, is that occasionally someone like you will make me angry, and I might just want to take their eyes out, and gobble them down with a beer chaser. Or take them out to the beach, and bury them up to the chin below the high tide mark at low tide. Or just bash their brains in.

And, because I'm a peaceful person, I don't do any of those things-not because I fear the force of the law, or consequences, but because I simply choose not to follow the impulse-which is there.

Torture? Sure, love to-not for information or something as trivial as that, but just for the pleasure of watching you suffer.Coat you with honey and stake you out on an anthill. Burn you alive. Shoot arrows at you so you bleed out slowly. Peel off your skin. Feed you to my dogs a little bit at a time. Draw and quarter you.

All just for the pleasure of watching you suffer.

Homicide? Sure, love to-not for financial gain, or property, or even self-defense. Just for the sheer pleasure of the cries of your pain, the smell of your blood and entrails-to reduce you to nothing but blood, sweat, screams and one last exhalation.

Carefully cut out your liver, and let you watch as I saute it with onions, and then eat it? Well, liver's an occasional pleasure, so I'd have to be in the mood for liver, but that's about it.....sure-I'm willing to bet that your liver would taste alot better than that pate I made a coupla weeks ago....

Put your head on a pike on my fence, or feed it to my dogs? Absolutely.

It's in my blood, after all......

What I've learned is anger management-but I wouldn't have to manage my anger if some people would manage their stupidity.

 

[shesulsa]

:s393:

 

[shesulsa]

... elder, elder, elder ...

Don't you know you're not allowed to like it unless you're fighting in the US military for a right wing cause?

 

[elder999]

... elder, elder, elder ...

Don't you know you're not allowed to like it unless you're fighting in the US military for a right wing cause?

Don't see as I have much choice in that regard, except to not get into that situation again, and I haven't.......if it ever comes up again, though............

 

[billc]

If you have read the Federalist papers you know that the founding father's didn't need the example of the iroquois to create our system...http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24099

On their contribution to our founding...

Those who support the theory that the First Peoples influenced the drafting of the founding documents point to the words of founders such as Benjamin Franklin, who in 1751 wrote to his printer colleague James Parker that “It would be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.”

You might want to reread the Federalist Papers and some of the European philosophers that the founders cited for which forms of governments worked and didn't work in the past...

Other scholars are not convinced. Anthropologist Elisabeth Tooker, for example, argued that European political theory and precedent furnished the models for American Founders, while evidence for Indian influence was very thin. Although the concept of the Iroquoian Confederation may have been similar to the United States’ first efforts to unite alliance, the Iroquois constructed their government under very different principles. The member nations of the Iroquois League all lived under matrilineal societies, in which they inherited status and possessions through the mother’s line. Headmen were not elected, but rather clan mothers chose them. Representation was not based on equality or on population. Instead, the number of Council members per nation was based on the traditional hierarchy of nations within the confederation. Moreover, the League of Six Nations did not have a centralized authority like that of the federal system the Euro-Americans eventually adopted.

 

[elder999]

You might want to reread the Federalist Papers and some of the European philosophers that the founders cited for which forms of governments worked and didn't work in the past...

You might want to read the Congressional Record:

S. CON RES. 76
Whereas, the original framers of the Constitution, including most notably, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles and governmental practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy; and,
Whereas, the Confederation of the original thirteen colonies into one Republic was explicitly modeled upon the Iroquois Confederacy as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself;

:lfao:

Of course, for what it's worth, most of the Iroqouis fought beside the British, and against the colonies during our Revolution, but hey.....

 

[billc]

Elder, that "congressional record," was from 1987 when they were recognizing some sort of native american legislation and were making nice and mouthing platitudes. I thought you might have something from the actual debates and the actual time period involved. Otherwise, I stand by the Federalist Papers and their discussion of the various forms of government the founders were familiar with from the history they had studied, from the romans, the Greeks and the other European forms of government that they discussed and debated.

from the 1987 congressional record...

Wednesday, September 16, 1987 100th Cong. 1st Sess.133 Cong Rec S 12214
REFERENCE: Vol. 133 No. 140

TITLE: SENATE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION 76 -- TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE IROQUOIS CONFEDERACY OF NATIONS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION AND TO REAFFIRM THE CONTINUING GOVERNMENT-TO-GOVERNMENT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INDIAN TRIBES AND THE UNITED STATES
ESTABLISHED IN THE CONSTITUTION

Making nice and mouthing platitudes...

There is a list of the Senators in attendance at this senate session...hmmmm...I don't think any of them were at the debates on the creation of the Articles of Confederation or the creation of the United States Constitution. Find me some records of the constitutional convention where the founders name the Iroquois as there example for their form of government, as opposed to the Roman Republic, or the Greek City States, the Magna Charta, the Scottish clans, or the Holy Roman Empire or the Persian and Egyptian forms of governments, and I might cede the point to you.

 

[billc]

Hmmmm...from the 1987 congressional record...

example of a free association of independent Indian nations;

I believe if you read some of my previous posts, the fact that the Iroquois were brutal to their enemies might have encouraged the "free" association of these early Americans, and point to the fact that they were making nice in 1987.

From the house resolution linked above...

Whereas an emphasis on freedom, justice, patriotism, and representative government have always been elements of Native American culture;

.

You mean the Native American Cultures that engaged in slavery, human sacrifice, empire building (Aztec, Mayan, Incan ) or the war like Iroquois who so intimidated the other "native americans," that they developed stories of cannabalism about the Iroquois to go along with their actual practices of horribly torturing their captured prisoners. Hmmmm...


Just asking. Again...playing nice and mouthing platitudes...

 

[shesulsa]

Aaaaand ... just how nice and welcoming are YOU to bandits in the night who step foot in your home with smiles on their faces and disease-ridden blankets in their arms?

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

 

[billc]

From another article...

The English colonists did not need the Indians to tell them about federalism or self-government. The New England Confederation was organized as early as 1643. The claim of influence is based on a very strange idea of causality: Franklin at the Albany Conference in 1754 learned about federalism and self-government from the Iroquois and then 33 years later at Philadelphia passed on these ideas to his fellow delegates at the Convention. Never mind that Franklin was very elderly and scarcely spoke at the Convention. For discussion of the issue see articles by Elisabeth Tooker in Ethnohistory vols 35 (1988) and 37 (1990).--Gordon Wood

 

[Touch Of Death]

Aaaaand ... just how nice and welcoming are YOU to bandits in the night who step foot in your home with smiles on their faces and disease-ridden blankets in their arms?

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

OK, you went to far. There was a letter written, back in the day, suggesting giving disease ridden blankets to the Indians, but there are no documented cases.
Sean

 

[billc]

The article...http://hnn.us/articles/12974.html

But what disappointed me about this piece is that it recapitulates the tired and dubious argument about the purported Iroquois influence on the Constitution, and the more general proposition that important elements of Euro-American democratic culture have origins in "the democratic, informal brashness of American Indian culture."

What's wrong with the Iroquois influence hypothesis? There are two principal and, I think, fatal objections to the idea that anything in the Constitution can be explained with reference to the precedents of the Haudenosaunee confederation.
The first is a simple evidentiary matter. The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois. It is of course possible that the framers and ratifiers went out of their way to suppress the evidence, out of embarrassment that they were so intellectually dependent on the indigenous sources of their political ideas. But these kinds of arguments from silence or conspiratorial suppression are difficult for historians to credit.

But, it is objected, there were no real European antecedents and sources for the institutions that Americans created, or for the democratic mores by which they came to live. Again, this is a claim that cannot escape serious scrutiny. All the key political concepts that were the stuff of American political discourse before the Revolution and after, had obvious European antecedents and referents: bicameralism, separation of powers, confederations, and the like. Even on the egalitarian side of the political ledger, 17th-century English society did give rise, after all, to the radical sentiments and practices we associate particularly with the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, the Levellers and the Putney debates, and the abolition of the House of Lords and the monatchy. And on this side of the water, New England colonists managed to set up town meetings before they had made much progress creating vocabularies of Indian words. The same can of course be said for the famous meeting of the Virginia assembly in 1619.

None of this is to deny that prolonged contact between the aboriginal and colonizing populations were important elements in the shaping of colonial society and culture. Whether those contacts left a significant political legacy, however, is a very different question.

 

[elder999]

I believe if you read some of my previous posts, the fact that the Iroquois were brutal to their enemies might have encouraged the "free" association of these early Americans, and point to the fact that they were making nice in 1987.

No, billi.

First, if you look at this post, made long before you got here:

At the time of colonization, the European mind was still filled with notions of class and many felt this Indian belief in absolute liberty was dangerous to a well-ordered society. This prejudice was so deeply rooted that when the frontiersman Robert Rogers told a British audience that among the people who lived in these tribes, "Every man is free," and that they believe no one "has any right to deprive [anyone] else of his freedom," the audience was incredulous. Further north, the French tried to "educate" the Haudenosaunee and other Indians they met with the concept of deference to their social betters. The Indians, almost universally, flunked the course. Already free, already democratic, and already independent, they couldn’t see any advantages in changing.

To the Haudenosaunee, on the other hand, the way the white men split themselves into classes, with those in the lower classes having to defer to those in the upper classes, seemed an appalling way to live. They could not believe any man could or should bow to another and each regarded the most important person in the universe to be himself.

Gradually, this attitude of freedom rubbed off on many of the whites, and much to the chagrin of many of the colonial "leaders," many who felt oppressed went to live among the Indians, to breath the air of their freedom. Even creating laws with threats of "dire punishment" that forbade whites to go live among the Indians couldn’t stop them from fleeing. but few Indians ever came to live among the whites.

you'll see that the very idea of individual liberty, and a classless society so important to the founders-and not part of any of the other previous models of government you cite-is entirely native in origin.

Secondly, the natives are the reason that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" were used by Jefferson, instead of "life, liberty and property"-because he saw that the natives were happy without property-of the two, he saw happiness as the higher aspiration, and so he included a wholly native idea.

If you really look to the work of Benjamin Franklin, you'll find that between 1736 and 1762, he printed and sold translations of the proceedings of Indian treaty councils-they sold quite well, for a guy who never really managed to keep much money, anyway...on the eve of the French and Indian War, in 1754, Franklin went to Albany, NY for a special congress to propose a union of the colonies-and the Haudenosaunee. "People of the Long House." Several iroquopis were in attendance, and the governor of New York, James De Lancey, invited an Iroquois sachem named Hedrick to address the congress and explain the structure of the Iroquois Confederacy. After Hedrick spoke, de Lancey said:

“I hope that by this present Union, we shall grow up to a great height and be as powerful and famous as you were of old.”

What became Franklin's "Albany Plan" for uniting the colonies, was modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy. Years later, in 1775, when independence was being debated, Iroquois chiefs were invited to attend, and reminded of "the advice that was given about thirty years ago, by your wise forefathers" Lastly, if you look to the notes of Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress, you'll see he documents the visit by Iroquois dignitaries while framing the Articles of Confederacy, and that elements of the Iroquois Confederacy were incoroporated into the Articles of Confederacy-elements that would later become Articles I, VI and VII of our Constitution.

So you have to look before the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, back through the French and Indian War, to a democracy that had existed on this continent for more than 600 years for a thread of foundational and unique ideas that extends from that democracy, through the Continental Congress and Articles of Confederation directly to our Constitution.

But hey, it's no biggie-I get it-you want it all to just be the white guys' idea, without the stain of torture, brutality and slavery that is Iroquois history. Sorry.

The white guys had their own torture, brutality and slavery to stain history with.....:lfao: