#GAReads | What Women's Suffrage Owes to Indigenous Culture
“What Women's Suffrage Owes to Indigenous Culture”:
It’s an under-known fact that the “revolutionary” concept of a democratic union of discrete states did not spring fully formed from the Enlightenment pens of the Founding Fathers, like sage Athena from the head of Zeus. No, the idea of “united states” sprang from the Haudenosaunee, collective name for six tribes that comprise the so-called (mostly by non-Natives) Iroquois Confederacy: the Seneca, Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Tuscarora nations. Should you doubt this, check out Congressional Resolution 331, adopted in 1988 by the 100th Congress of the United States, which says as much. It’s worth noting that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy still thrives today, likely the world’s oldest participatory democracy.
What a shame, then, that in addition to a model of an indivisible democratic union, the Founding Fathers didn’t also see in Haudenosaunee culture a new (to Europeans) and better model of gender parity.
But, nah.