of the Iroquois League. Although one arrow is easily broken, no one can break
six (or thirteen) at once.
John Mohawk has argued that American Indians are directly or indirectly
responsible for the public-meeting tradition, free speech, democracy, and “all
those things which got attached to the Bill of Rights.” Without the Native
example, “do you really believe that all those ideas would have found birth
among a people who had spent a millennium butchering other people because
of intolerance of questions of religion?”^55 Mohawk may have overstated the
case for Native democracy, since heredity played a major role in officeholding
in many American Indian societies. His case is strengthened, however, by the
fact that wherever Europeans went in the Americas, they projected monarchs
(“King Philip”) or other undemocratic leaders onto Native societies. To some
degree, this projecting was done out of European self-interest, so they could
claim to have purchased tribal land as a result of dealing with one person or
faction. The practice also betrayed habitual European thought: Europeans
could not believe that nations did not have such rulers, since that was the only
form of government they knew.
For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native
Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-era
cartoonists used images of American Indians to represent the colonies against
Britain. Virginia’s patriot rifle companies wore Indian clothes and moccasins
as they fought the redcoats. When colonists took action to oppose unjust
authority, as in the Boston Tea Party or the antirent protests against Dutch
plantations in the Hudson River valley during the 1840s, they chose to dress as
American Indians, not to blame Indians for the demonstrations but to
appropriate a symbol identified with liberty.^56
Of course, Dutch traditions influenced Plymouth as well as New York. So
did English common law and the Magna Carta. American democracy seems to
be another example of syncretism, combining ideas from Europe and Native
America. The degree of Native influence is hard to specify, since that influence
came through several sources. Textbooks might present it as a soft hypothesis
rather than hard fact. But they should not leave it out. In all the textbooks I
surveyed, discussion of any intellectual influence of Native Americans on
European Americans was limited to a single caption in one book, Discovering
American History, beneath a wampum belt paired with Benjamin Franklin’s
famous cartoon of a divided, hence dying snake. “Franklin’s Albany Plan might