in 1890, whites continued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle,
such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in white society.
Communist Eastern Europe erected an Iron Curtain to stop its outflow but
could never explain why, if communist societies were the most progressive on
earth, they had to prevent people from defecting. American colonial
embarrassment similarly went straight to the heart of their ideology, also an
ideology of progress. Textbooks in Eastern Europe and the United States have
handled the problem in the same way: by omitting the facts. Not one American
history textbook mentions the attraction of Native societies to European
Americans and African Americans.
African Americans frequently fled to American Indian societies to escape
bondage. What did whites find so alluring? According to Benjamin Franklin,
“All their government is by Counsel of the Sages. There is no Force; there are
no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.” Probably
foremost, the lack of hierarchy in the Native societies in the eastern United
States attracted the admiration of European observers.^50 Frontiersmen were
taken with the extent to which Native Americans enjoyed freedom as
individuals. Women were also accorded more status and power in most Native
societies than in white societies of the time, which white women noted with
envy in captivity narratives. Although leadership was substantially hereditary
in some nations, most American Indian societies north of Mexico were much
more democratic than Spain, France, or even England in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. “There is not a Man in the Ministry of the Five Nations,
who has gain’d his Office, otherwise than by Merit,” waxed Lt. Gov.
Cadwallader Colden of New York in 1727. “Their Authority is only the
Esteem of the People, and ceases the Moment that Esteem is lost.” Colden
applied to the Iroquois terms redolent of “the natural rights of mankind”: “Here
we see the natural Origin of all Power and Authority among a free People.”^51
Indeed, Native American ideas are partly responsible for our democratic
institutions. We have seen how Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality
found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas
More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. These European
thinkers then influenced Americans such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison.^52
In recent years historians have debated whether American Indian ideas may
also have influenced our democracy more directly. Through 150 years of
colonial contact, the Iroquois League stood before the colonies as an object