Description:
American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence serves as a welcoming volume for a much needed conversation about the origins of our founding documents and more importantly, about the wisdom of Native American ways of living and how they can be applied as an alternative to our present political dilemmas.
Through eighteen eloquent essays, we hear contemporary Haudenosaunee leaders and scholars speak about life in present-day reservations, and most importantly, about the Great Law of Peace, the unifying code of governance that united these once warring tribes into one of the most formidable and truly democratic league of nations that the continent has ever witnessed.
American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence invites us to look back and outside of our cultural, social, and political box in order to move ourselves and our country towards a more just and peaceful place.
Review Quotes:
"The world needs to consider the knowledge of Native cultures. In American Indigenous Democracy, our Haudenosaunee relatives have crafted a crucial message for our times. The Great Law of Peace, their ancestral way of governance, their 'constitution, ' is discussed and offered here for its Indigenous genius, as a way to deepen and re-humanize government and public life in the United States.''
- Dr. Henrietta Mann, Southern Cheyenne, Sun Dance Elder, academic, and activist who pioneered the creation of Native American Studies programs
"American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence is a much-needed and well-researched book that documents the truth that democracy was developed in North America, and is its gift to the world. On this fragile planet, only understanding the roots and hopes of democracy can give us a safe future. The Haudenosaunee were living it, they are still, and we have much to learn from them.''
- Gloria Steinem, writer, political activist, and feminist organizer
"The story Americans tell about their Constitution has always been incomplete. American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence repairs that omission - recovering the living political traditions of Native Peoples as a constitutive force in the founding of the United States, not its backdrop. In the era when democratic norms are under siege, that recovery is not merely scholarly: it is necessary."
- Thomas W. Krise, President, University of Guam (2018-2023), under whose presidency the university adopted an Island Wisdom framework centering higher education in
Indigenous Knowledge