Building Wealth - Cutting Costs

Well not completely but on some levels it appears to be so. Let’s take a trip back to grade school and remember what we were taught about Native Americans or “American Indians” (though some consider that term politically incorrect). The short answer was that the Americas were sparsely populated with many tribes and they where not a very advanced civilization. This is just yet another example of our school system teaching dogma rather then facts, and you would think liberals would be all over this one?

The reality is when Europeans first came to the Americas they were heavily populated and very advanced in many ways. Recent archaeological evidence is that both continents were heavily settled and the Indians, in both North and South America, had, for millennia, shaped the land to fit their needs and desires. This includes even the rain forest that lies in Amazonia. It was the diseases that the first visitors that decimated the populations and left them in the sparse state that we pushed onto reservations a few centuries later.

Despite this they may have had more to do with our Constitution then the Magna Carta or Greek Influence and by a large margin. Apparently people known as the Haudenosaunee (ho-dee-no-SHO-nee) or Iroquois as we leaned to call them in school and were made up of six tribes that inhabitated the area in and around today’s upstate New York had a “Great Law of Peace” that specified among other things,

• A council would rule the tribes and their business between each other but power was granted to the council and could be with drawn and the council only made decisions on external matters like peace treaties
• The council had no power over the inner functions of tribes
• The council could not declare war with out a referendum from the people
• Every man was considered free and would never subject himself to the will of any other man

Does this sound familiar? It should and in fact one of the biggest issues that Europeans had with American Indians is that they had no respect for any “class structure”, they believed no man was better then any other man simply due to a birth right, possessed wealth or title. For this they were both feared and despised. Much of the revolutionary idealism that spawned the American Revolution came directly from colonists interaction with Native Americans.

This is yet another sacrifice that went into creating what was once the most free nation on the planet. Today many of the constitutional freedoms our founders died and risked all for are either gone or may soon be.

To learn more about these true roots of America’s freedom I recommend the book - 1491, - New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus - by Charles C. Mann.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Business & Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.