We’re coming up on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In many ways, inadvertently and with blinding ignorance, the MAGA regime holding an Ultimate Fighting match on the south lawn of the White House to celebrate our country’s anniversary is strangely allegorical, because we have literally been fighting for our freedom this whole time, and largely, we’ve been doing battle with people like Trump. To be fair, the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were much smarter than the control freaks we have to contend with today, but let’s not kid ourselves, they had no intention of giving the majority of us the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s kind of romantic (I’ve done it) to think that Jefferson might have meant ‘people’ when he wrote that All Men Are Created Equal, and that in his mind, someday it would apply to everyone. But the evidence just doesn’t support that theory. So, as you study American history and the rise of modern representative governments everywhere, keep in mind that it was not people like Jefferson who brought about what any of us modern Sapiens would consider to be a democracy; it was the people who took what Jefferson had said and made it real. The same people that Jefferson had never intended to be included in his vision of freedom.
If that sounds harsh or even un-American to some people, well, all I can say is take it up with Ken Burns or Heather Cox Richardson. They might not agree with everything I’m going to say here, but they’ll agree that Jefferson and his peeps (Heather likes to use the word peeps, it’s kind of funny) did not set out to create a multicultural representative government that included women. Oh, and also, get off my lawn. And when I say my lawn, I mean the one at the White House. It’s the people’s lawn.
So, anyhow, now that we’re living in yet another non-democratic version of America, one that definitely doesn’t live up to our vision of what a Democracy is supposed to be, should we be happy on this anniversary? Should we celebrate? And what are we celebrating exactly? Jefferson’s beautiful prose? The yellowed document sitting under glass that we’ve come to believe represents something other than what the people who created it originally meant? The birth of the United States of America, even though we didn’t have a government until 1789? Or do we celebrate the struggle? And all of those who fought to realize an ideal that many of us have come to believe a Democracy is supposed to be. Because that is something to celebrate. The illusion, or rather the propaganda, that a handful of men back in 1776 introduced the notion of freedom to the world and ever since we should be grateful that we’re lucky enough to live in the greatest country on Earth, is not what we should be celebrating. It’s actually disinformation designed to keep us from understanding our own history. America was not born a democracy; that comes later, much later, around 1965, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And well after women gave themselves the right to vote. And well after immigrants fought for labor rights, ushering in the New Deal. It’s an achievement that came at a cost, a cost that we don’t give nearly enough recognition.
But I also think it’s important to recognize that, contrary to our core beliefs, the Declaration of Independence is not the first time in human history that people staked out their right to be free. From our Western viewpoint, mankind has always lived under some sort of authoritarian rule or been burdened by notions of class and status. Confined in borders and doomed to be either a serf or a royal by the happenstance of birth. But that’s not really the case, and the architects of our own constitution saw that firsthand. It’s probably what informed their vision of self-governance when they decided to break from the Crown. So, beyond the hard-fought gains of labor, women’s suffrage, and the civil rights movement, we should also recognize the role of the people whose land America now occupies. After all, if we don’t know our own history, what are we celebrating?
I’ve written about this before in a piece called Will and Harper and History Too, which focused more on gender and patriarchy, but it also easily applies to the genesis of our nation’s founding.
In the book The Dawn of Everything, the authors David Graeber and David Wengrow make some compelling and well-documented claims. Namely, that new ideas about personal freedom and how governments could be structured were making their way back to the European populace from what they were calling the New World. Information was flowing back and forth, with European writers bringing back accounts from the Americas, and some of its inhabitants learning European languages and passing ideas along as well. This included many concepts that went against European notions of class structure, the meaning of freedom and the divine right of kings. European explorers were often shocked to find that many of these societies across the Atlantic operated by consensus and debate, and included women in their governance. Those from the New World who travelled to Europe were, in turn, shocked by the stark inequalities and class structures that marked European life.
We like to think that Democracy sprang out of Greece and Rome and the Enlightenment. Well, the Enlightenment also coincides with Europe beginning to interact with the people in the new lands they came across, and Graeber and Wengrow make a pretty strong case that North American societies of the time influenced Europe more than traditional Western historians wanted to admit. Oren Lyons, Haudenosaunee Faithkeeper of both the Onandaga and Seneca Nations, has been explaining the influence that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had on the colonies for most of his career, dating back to the 1970s. Even though there is ample evidence in the historical record, it’s only been more recently that many historians have agreed that indeed, as Oren has been saying, the dudes we call the Founding Fathers were influenced by the Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy predates European arrival, and by the time there were thirteen colonies, it was comprised of six nations, speaking different languages in a nonpatriarchal, representative government with a series of checks and balances. They were probably much more influential to the colonies than anything going on in Europe at the time. Jefferson and Franklin were especially interested in what the Haudenosaunee were doing. Both met with them frequently, sitting in on political conferences, and Franklin published many of their speeches and treaty councils. Most famously, he published the Treaty of Lancaster, where Canassatego, the then Chief of the Onondaga, urged the colonial leaders to form a confederacy of their own, telling them it would make them stronger. For effect, he pulled out an arrow and snapped it in half over his knee, and then bundled six together—one for each of the nations in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy—showing that the colonies would be unbreakable if they were united. We still have the imagery of the thirteen arrows representing the unified colonies on our Great Seal of the United States today. And Franklin advocated for adopting some of the Haudenosaunee governing concepts into the colonies well before the Declaration of Independence was written.
So, some of the First Nation societies in America not only introduced notions of personal freedoms that influenced European society, they also had concepts of self-governance that the architects of the American Revolution wanted to adopt. With some caveats, of course. They weren’t going to allow power-sharing with women, as the Haudenosaunee did, and they weren’t going to abandon notions of race, gender, class and patriarchy. They basically liked the idea of freedom that they saw in Native American societies and wanted it for themselves. And then, of course, the government they created, in turn, set out to deprive the very people by whom they were inspired of those same freedoms—and to erase them from history.
Kind of like today. Where the control freaks setting up an ultimate fighting match on the lawn of the people’s house want to run around and tell us that America, this America, the one we all forged with our sacrifice and blood and sweat, was founded as a Christian Nation. That a handful of righteous rich white dudes invented Democracy and gave the world the idea of freedom. It had nothing to do with women, or immigrants, or black people, or the goddamned indians. Just white dudes like them, and we should be grateful that we get to live under their rule—or else.
Yep, these are the guys we’re going to have to take down. Just like always. Same old song and dance, my friend.
But the good news is there are more of us than them. There always have been. There are more people who want everybody to be free than there are the control freaks who are running amok in our country right now. And the only way we’re going to make something better after we put these maniacs to rest—and without going into the horrors they wish to unleash on the rest of us, I still believe that one way or the other we eventually will put them to rest—is if we remember how we got our Democracy in the first place. How the people already in the Americas gave the Europeans a new notion of what freedom is, and how after our founding, the most marginalized among us rose up and took the words of Jefferson and made them real. Because that’s where we’re going to get the ideas that will take us forward into a better future. For all of us.
That’s just reality, and that’s American history. And that is something to celebrate.