And Endowed by the Great Mystery

Among the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence (that's what this fourth of July thing is supposed to be about, right?) is some outright slander of American Indians, despicable crap that Jefferson and his fellows knew wasn't true.

It's fitting and proper that the founding document of the United States should include the shadow of the entire European invasion enterprise. It's fitting that we acknowledge this as well as the eloquence and historical importance of this document.

But don't miss the oped piece in the New York Times that spells out some of the ways that American Indians and their cultures created and shaped the entire idea of liberty and equality. For instance:

When the 17th-century French adventurer Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan, tried to convince the Huron, the Iroquois's northern neighbors, of Europe's natural superiority, the Indians scoffed. Because Europeans had to kowtow to their social betters, Lahontan later reported, "they brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having." Individual Indians, he wrote "value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for it, that one's as much master as another, and since men are all made of the same clay there should be no distinction or superiority among them."

It's probably fitting then that so many seem compelled to celebrate this day by shooting off explosives. American Indians provided key ideas (which combined with European ideas as well, from the Enlightenment back to the Romans and Greeks and probably the Indigenous peoples there, because as this piece rightly points out, pre-agricultural societies are characteristically more egalitarian than post-agricultural ones. Read Paul Shepard on why this is so.) But the European transplants had the guns.

That particular war of the worlds worked out badly for the indigenous, especially since it was they who caught the imported diseases. Because they didn't live in overcrowded unsanitary conditions, they hadn't developed virulent contagious diseases of their own, and so had no immunity and no horrible germs for the invaders to catch. Wells' novel actually hints at this, although the Spielberg film that is this 4ths spectacle can only suggest what being invaded is like, and let the imaginative extrapolate, to Iraq for example, or even to their own U.S. backyards, before and even after the first big 4th of July weekend.

The Founding Sachems - New York Times