Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1993 18:31:26 +0200 From: Thomas Eriksson To: ceci@lysator.liu.se America's Founding Mothers : Our Native American Roots ------------------------------------------------------ Excerpted from the book 'The Graywolf Annual Five : Multi-Cultural Literacy (1988) Graywolf Press, St. Paul...originally appeared in the book 'The Sacred Hoop (C) 1986 by Paula Gunn Allen, Beacon Press, Boston. America has an amazing loss of memory concerning its origins in the culture of Native Americans. America does not seem to remember that it derived its wealth, its values, its food, much of its medicine, and a large part of its "dream" from Native America. It is ignorant of the genisis of its culture in this Native American Land, and that ignorance helps to perpetuate the long-standing oppression of women, gays, lesbians, people of color, the working class, the unemployed, and the elderly through the monotheistic, hierarchial, and patriarchal cultures of Europe and the Middle East. Hardly anyone in America speculates that the constitutional system of goverment might be as much a product of American Indian ideas and practices as of colonial America and Anglo-European revolutionary fervor. Even though Indians are officially and informally ignored as intellectual movers and shapers in the United States, they are peoples with ancient tenure on this soil. During the ages when tribal socities existed in the Americas largely untouched by patriarchal oppresion, they developed elaborate systems of thought that included science, philosophy, and goverment based on a belief in the central importance of female energies as well as autonomy of individuals, cooperation, human dignity, human freedom, and egalitarian distribution of status, goods, and services. And in those that lived by the largest number of these principles, gynarchy (a female- dominated system of goverance) was the norm rather than the exception. There are many female gods recognized and honored by tribes and nations. Femaleness was highly valued - both respected and feared - and all social institutions reflected this attitude. Even modern sayings, such as the Cheyenne statement that a people is not conquered until the hearts of the women are on the ground, express the Indians' understanding that without the power of women the people will not live - but with it, they will endure and prosper. Indians did not confine this belief in the central importance of female energy to matters of worship. Amoung many of the tribes (perhaps as many as 70 percent of them in North America alone), this belief was reflected in all of their social institutions. The Iroquois Constitution, also called the Great Law of the Iroquois, codified the women's decision-making and economic power, legislating that land ownership passed on matrilinearly, and that women resolved tribal disputes and hired and fired chiefs. Belifs, attitudes, and laws such as these became part of the vision of America feminists and of other human liberation movements around the world. Yet feminists too often believe that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that would empower women and make that empowerment the basis of its rules of civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware of the recent presence of gynarchical socities on this continent is unnecessary confusion, division, and much lost time. We as feminists must be aware of our history on this continent. We need to recognize that the same forces that devistated the gynarchies of Britain and the Continent also devistated the ancient African civilizations, and we must know that those same materialistic, anti-spiritual forces are presently engaged in wiping out the same gynarchical values, along with the peoples who adhere to them, in Latin America. I am convinced that those wars were and continue to be about the imposition of patriarchal civilization over the holistic, pacifist, and spirit-based gynarchies they supplant. To that end, the wars of imperial conquest have not been solely or even mostly waged over the land and its resources, but fought within the bodies, minds, and hearts of the people of the earth for dominion over them. I think this is the reason traditional Indians say we must remember our origins, our cultures, our histories, our mothers and grandmothers, for without that memory, which implies continuance rather than nostalgia, we are doomed to be engulfed by a system that is fundimentally inimical to the vitality, autonomy, and self-enpowerment essential for satisfying, high-quality life. --Paula Gunn Allen