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