Preface to Second Volume

As to our aboriginal or Indian population . . . I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence, a blank. But I am not at all clear about that. As America . . . develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own -- are we to see it cheerfully accepting using all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside globe -- and then rejecting the only ones distinctively its own . . . ? (Moquin, 5-6)

--Walt Whitman, 1883

Increased general awareness of Iroquois precedents for democracy (and the continuing debate over them) has not kept a sizable number of people (some of them conservatives bearing household names) from dismissing the idea with a spit and a sneer, with no knowledge that a genuine debate has been engaged. During the last few years, with a mixture of consternation and awe, I have watched a number of very well-known conservative authors and pundits attempt to turn the idea I have researched into canon fodder in the so-called culture wars over multicultural education. The idea of Iroquois influence (and the sharp debate over it) has spread out much faster than the research and understanding of historical circumstances required to make sense of it.

Having researched the question of Iroquois influence in the origins of democracy since the middle 1970s, I began an annotated bibliography of reactions to the idea during the early 1990s. In 1996, roughly the first 500 of these reactions were published by Greenwood Press as Native American Political Systems and the Evolution of Democracy: An Annotated Bibliography. By 1999, the number of reactions had reached 1,000. The second half of these are contained in this volume.

I have harvested these reactions from various books, academic journals, magazines, and databases at the same time that my bibliography has been enriched by a steady infusion of references on the idea from the past, in some cases, as long as a century and a half ago. Taken as a whole, the proportion of references in favor of the idea is, over time, greater than its depictions as "feel-good" history, myth, utter falsehood, or an exercise in wishful thinking that an old hippie ("Boomer") dragged in.

The outright denials of the idea can be telling of larger angsts in our culture. This is a subject that tempts the willingly ignorant to make rash statements. With mass media attention to the idea of Iroquois influence, the rhetoric of the debate has slipped its historical moorings and been driven into a rhetorical sea by contemporary storms over political correctness and multiculturalism. Ground up and spit out by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, et. al., the "debate" becomes a muddy porridge of buzzwords and factoids, simplified, then blown horribly out of proportion to make the case for Iroquois influence sound ridiculous and vapid. The idea travels much faster in "factoid" form than the research supporting it. I sometimes close my eyes and imagine my story making the rounds like a fearsome plague of countless conservative cocktail parties, with an ideological life of its own to which I have no access, and over which I exercise no control. The forging of historical memory on a mass scale can be a very strange process, indeed.

As a student of communication, I have assembled a referential history of the "influence" idea to illustrate how an idea can spread through literate culture at several levels. Aside from its ability to cause numerous well-known conservatives to lose their intellectual lunches, the "influence" idea has been adapted to debates in several academic fields, most often in law, American history and Native American Studies, but also in English, philosophy, religion, and public administration, along with sociology, anthropology, and ethnohistory.

The idea that the Iroquois helped shape democracy has lost none of its power to evoke horror stories of "political correctness" on the Far Right. Jonathan Foreman, in William F. Buckley's National Review, bemoans his belief that "Baby Boomers" have infected Hollywood movies with liberal values based on their "generational experience" in the 1960s. Collectively, Foreman argues, these "Boomers" are shaping the media with their "delusions." He moans, by way of letting his conservative audience know just how stupid the "Boomers" can be, that "We live in a society where some students are taught that the United States Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois, that the Greeks stole science from Africans, and that the Aztecs were sweeties who didn't really eat people like popcorn." (Foreman)

"We have already seen this in feminist and Afrocentric studies," writes Robert H. Bork, in his 1996 polemic Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. "But it is everywhere. In New York State it is official educational doctrine that the United States Constitution was heavily influenced by the political arrangements of the Iroquois Confederacy." (Bork, 306-307)

Bork has made up his mind with the certitude of the supremely ignorant that research cannot possibly exist on such a silly subject as how the Iroquois Confederacy helped shape democracy. He writes, with an air of apparent authority: "The official promulgation of this idea was not due to any research that disclosed its truth," but because "the Iroquois had an intensive lobbying campaign." (Bork, 306-307)

There you have it in the Book of Bork -- "no research," and from a person who has been called a legal scholar, one who has been nominated to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Really, it is Bork who has done no research on the subject. One learns very quickly that in the marketplace of ideas some people have big bullhorns, and others have small ones. I have learned that my bullhorn as a scholar sometimes carries a very, very small toot. In the meantime, Bork's book reached the number eight slot on the New York Times list of best-selling non-fiction books in the United States.

Bork ends his diatribe against the issue by claiming that he speaks for the 38,000 Iroquois in New York State, "most of whom probably have no interest in the myth of the Iroquois and the Constitution." (Bork, 307) In one paragraph, Bork indicts the Iroquois for muscling the idea into the New York State educational system, and in another he says they really don't care. Bork supplies no Iroquois support for his assertion.

Bork's is merely one of the most hysterical of several recent reactions to a valid effort to broaden the ambit of our political history. Phyllis Schlafly, for example, grumbled in an opinion piece for the Copley News Service that "A high school social studies teacher told me that three new social-studies textbooks all pay homage to the new gods of multiculturalism by teaching that we got our Constitution from the Iroquois Indians." (Schlafly)

I should not, of course, let Schlafly's reference to me as one of the "gods of multiculturalism" go to my head, since she (nor Bork) probably has never heard of (much less read) anything I have written on this or any other subject. I have followed the unfolding of this debate for a quarter century, and never cease to be amazed at the fact that I seem to have lucked onto a dissertation subject on which nearly everyone feels compelled to take a political position, including a sizable number of people who know next to nothing about the subject, Count among them Rush Limbaugh, Patrick Buchanan, John Leo, and George Will, to name a sampling whose views appeared in the first bibliography.

Condemnation of the Iroquois-influence idea is not limited to know-nothings such as Limbaugh. Some of the scions of the American Society for Ethnohistory have been just as dismissive, although in a more elegant tone. Beginning with Elisabeth Tooker's 1988 critique of "influence," Ethnohistory, the society's journal, has long been a font of anti-"influence" rhetoric. Frederick Hoxie, president of ASE during 1997, revisited this ground in his presidential address to the organization's annual convention, titled "Ethnohistory for a Tribal World," condemning what he calls "contributionist" history.

Hoxie is a historian with a penchant for more than simply writing history. He is also a gatekeeper, an arbiter of ethnohistorical correctness, one who takes as his role the instruction of other historians what (to borrow Noam Chomsky's phrase) is inside and outside of the realm of permissible debate. Hoxie is not content to tell his own story and let others tell theirs. He is interested in establishing a party line by which some stories are told and other lines of inquiry shut down. Certain "scholarly paths," he tells us "are no longer helpful." (Hoxie, 600) " . . . A path that does not need expansion is represented by books from the `contributions' school . . . " which Hoxie says are authored by "romantic polemicists." (Hoxie, 602) The fact that Hoxie dismisses the whole idea of Iroquois influence on democracy without engaging the historical facts does not seem, to him, to qualify what he writes as a "polemic." He saves that word, with all its negative connotations, for those whose "angle on the fire" he dislikes -- Jack Weatherford and his (as Hoxie puts it, tossing in a personal insult) "less able colleagues," including, by name, the compiler of this bibliography. (Hoxie, 603, 605)

To Hoxie, the "polemical writings" of the "contributionist" approach are "simplistic," wearing "dull academic uniforms," involving "abuses and distortions," to be "set aside." (Hoxie, 606-607) Writers of such histories are said, by Hoxie, to resemble "cabaret pianists who talk about baseball while playing their repertoire of standards . . . engag[ing] . . . ultimately [in] secondary and superficial conversations with ethnohistorical materials . . . " (Hoxie, 605-606) Dazzled by Hoxie's imagery and bemused by one of the weirdest pieces of ad hominem rhetoric in his personal memory, this reader is left to assume, perhaps, that Professor Hoxie plays his piano in a renowned symphony, or at least uptown at the Ritz.

Having constructed a narrative that does not engage a single historical fact in the "influence" debate, Hoxie attempts to stuff it all down an Orwellian memory hole with a blast of his own polemical bombast. The gatekeeper reserves privileges for himself that plain-vanilla academic grunts do not enjoy, and, in so doing not only unfairly (and personally) demeans his opponents with searing polemics of his own, but seeks to shut them out of ethnohistorically correct debate, as he "officially" defines it. In this "conversation," Hoxie, by virtue of his exalted position, does all the talking.

Regarding Hoxie and other "Iroquois experts," Mohawk writer and activist Doug George-Kanentiio comments that "Some professionals grudgingly acknowledge that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) were the most influential indigenous people in North America, yet they dig in their heels at the thought that the Iroquois might have sparked the democratic ideals of the founders of the infant United States." (George)

William Starna, writing with George Hamell, condemned the idea vehemently in New York History. Usually, when scholars' ideas are attacked with such unabashed vigor, journal editors offer rebuttal space, as before, with us, in Ethnohistory and the William and Mary Quarterly. In this case, Starna and Hamell's piece found its way to us through a chain of friends nearly a year after its publication date, too late for an effective reply.

Starna and Hamell must have spent many hours ransacking footnotes in Exemplar of Liberty and other works. They find a handful of factual errors which they admit are minor. The problem here is that Starna and Hamell are so engaged in debunking details that they do not address any of the ideas that were communicated between the Iroquois and colonial Americans. Instead they debate, with excruciating attention to detail, whether Canassatego had brawny arms, and whether he was known for being unsociably direct after he had had a few drinks. As an elicitation of historical truth, this argument rings rather hollow. The piece is really ideologically driven character assassination masquerading as historical criticism. Starna and Hammel find errors like Senator Joseph McCarthy used to locate communists, blowing a few minor errors into an asserted conspiracy to perpetrate what they regard as a gigantic intellectual fraud, a line of reasoning that they have borrowed from another steadfast critic of the idea, Elisabeth Tooker.

In their rush to condemn, Starna and Hamell fail to extend their ambit beyond the debate over Iroquois influences on the Albany Plan, beginning with the words of Canassatego at the Lancaster Treaty Council of 1744. They ignore most of our case, which takes the "influence" idea from the early seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth. They also restrict their inquiry to New York sources, forgetting, perhaps, that representatives from other colonies (notably Pennsylvania) sent representatives to the important events of the time, who left records in their respective archives. Starna and Hamell all but accuse us of fabricating evidence that is available to anyone in the archives of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Virginia.

Those who are ready for some real academic mudwrestling may wish to consult Alvin J. Schmidt's The Menace of Multiculturalism. As his title indicates, Schmidt, a professor of sociology at Illinois College, Jacksonville, is a take-no-prisoners opponent of multiculturalism. At the beginning of a chapter titled "The Facts Be Damned," Schmidt lists a number of "facts" that he says multiculturalists have "invented." One of these is that "the Constitution of the United States was shaped by the Iroquois Indians." (Schmidt, 43-44) He also denies the idea that Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the Boston Massacre, was black (Attucks' father was black. His mother was Native American.) Since he has never heard of any of the many books and articles documenting it, Schmidt says that the "influence" idea is "undocumented." Schmidt would rather history stress the cruel and violent aspects of Native American cultures, which he says squishy-soft multiculturalists downplay. Schmidt is barely getting warmed up. Later in the book, he argues that American Indian cultures were environmentally destructive and that women in native societies lived "in virtual slavery." Returning to the Iroquois influence issue, Schmidt calls it a "fabrication," as well as "historical fiction." (Schmidt, 53-54)

As the contemporary debate has raged, one unexpected result of my most recent research has been a large number of older mentions of the "influence" idea. Many of these references surfaced in the context of reading with other objectives (most of it while writing a number of reference books for Greenwood Press). Strung together, these references reveal an impressive lineage from Lewis Henry Morgan through Frederich Engels, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. The idea popped up in New York Times editorials during 1873 and 1893, and in a general survey of American Indian societies first published in 1855.

In a survey of Native American cultures in the Western Hemisphere, first published in 1855, Charles de Wolf Brownell wrote that "The nature of the [Iroquois] league was decidedly democratic; arbitrary power was lodged in the hands of no ruler. . . . A singular unanimity was generally observed in their councils." (Brownell, 287) Brownell then added, on the same page: "We are told that for a long period before the [American] revolution, the Iroquois chiefs and orators held up their own confederation as an example for the imitation of the English colonies." By whom Brownell was told this, he does not say. It is possible that Brownell read the assertion in one of the early editions of Lewis Henry Morgan's League of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois (1851). Nearly a century after the pivotal events that formed the United States, Morgan characterized the Iroquois League as a federal model very much like the new nation: "The nations [of the Iroquois League] sustained nearly the same relation to the league that the American states bear to the Union. In the former, several oligarchies are combined within one, in the same manner as [in] the latter, several republics are embraced in one republic." (Morgan, 3)

Sometimes, new information creates historical riddles. For example, someone, very likely an Iroquois (a Seneca in one account, a Cayuga in two), expressed an opinion in 1808 (one account) or 1847 (two accounts) saying that the United States founding generation stood at the Longhouse door, and counted itself lucky to get the sweepings. Was it an unidentified Cayuga chief in 1808 (Armstrong, 42), Dr. Peter Wilson, a Cayuga, in 1847 (McLuhan, 100 ), or Ely S. Parker, a Seneca who served as secretary to General U.S. Grant, in 1847? (Parker, 1847) The record yields three possible authors of what is essentially the same sentence. The reference is said to have appeared in a paper, "Territorial Limits, Geographical Names and Trails of the Iroquois," which was read by Dr. Peter Wilson, a Cayuga, at a meeting of the New York Historical Society during 1847. Wilson said: "Have we, the first holders of this prosperous region, no longer a share in your history. Glad were your fathers to sit upon the threshold of the Long House, rich did they hold themselves in getting the mere sweepings from its door." McLuhan's source for this quotation is Lewis H. Morgan, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois. (New York: Dodd-Mead, 1904, Book 3, pp. 104-105), a fourth possible source for the quote.

At the turn of the century, the noted ethnographer of the Iroquois William N. Beauchamp took up the subject. While discussing the federal structure of the Iroquois Confederacy, Beauchamp writes that "Local affairs were left to national councils, as in our general and state governments." Beauchamp also writes that " . . . the chiefs do not seem to have worn any distinctive badge. . . . This is one of the curious resemblances in our national political system and that of the Iroquois." (Beauchamp, 342, 437)

Early in the twentieth century, the Seneca Arthur Parker annotated his version of the Great Law of Peace with this statement: "Here, then, we find the right of popular nomination, the right of recall and of woman suffrage flourishing in the old America of the Red Man . . . centuries before it became the clamor of the new America of the white invader. Who now shall call the Indians and the Iroquois savages?" (Parker, 1968, 11)

In a survey of American Indians published by the Smithsonian in 1929 (republished in 1934), Rose Palmer undertakes a detailed description of the Iroquois League, including its founding story and political organization. As part of this description, she writes: "It was an extraordinary genius for social organization, which culminated in a confederation that endured through two centuries and in some respects served as a model for the union of the Colonies." (Palmer, 81) I was surprised to find a school curriculum that took up the idea of Iroquois contributions to democracy, dated 1972, in Oakland, California. (Beals, 1972) I continue to be amazed at the scope of the debate, and the many audiences it has reached. Notable skirmishes in the debate have taken place in unlikely venues, such as Canada's Financial Post (Frum, 1998; Hipwell, 1998). In Illinois, mention that the "influence" idea played a role in the state assessment test for public-school students was enough to compel introduction of a bill to change the test. (O'Connor, 1998) The idea also has been presented to a Japanese audience. (Hoshikawa, 1997), and has been taken up in French and English newspapers.

The "influence" idea has even made waves in the U.S. Navy. During the fall of 1995, Washington Times Columnist John McCaslin ridiculed Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jeremy Boorda for sending a directive to "all commands on land and sea" honoring Native American contributions to democracy in observance of Native American Heritage Month in November. "And you thought the great genius of our form of government was bequeathed by that race of kings across yonder ocean -- the Magna Carta, the common law, and all that? But it wasn't, according to eminent historian and political scientist Jeremy Boorda, who moonlights as chief of naval operations." Adm. Boorda had encouraged all commands to "support programs and exhibits, publish items of interest in command bulletins, and promote maximum participation by military and civilian personnel." McCaslin quotes an unnamed "senior veteran" as calling this the silly season of politically correct admirals. The veteran is quoted as saying "I don't know whether to laugh or cry." (McCaslin, A-5) Mary Lefkowitz, a professor of Classics at Wellesley College, left me with another intriguing e-mail tidbit that I was not able to confirm with a published source until later: that the noted feminist Gloria Steinem had talked about the Iroquois role in the origins of democracy in a commencement speech at Wellesley. Professor Lefkowitz said she had heard the speech. I never was able to find a copy of that speech, but I did learn, through Sally Roesch Wagner, that Steinem was preparing to cite some of Wagner's research on Iroquois foundations of nineteenth-century feminism in an historical anthology. (Steinem) This survey work includes two chapters on the origins of feminism, one of which includes excerpts from Sally Roesch Wagner's work describing how the thoughts of Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were shaped by their association with Iroquois women in the mid-and-late nineteenth century.

As I was taking this volume to press, too late to enter new entry material, I found an interview with Steinem in the San Francisco Chronicle about her new book. The interviewer, Patricia Holt, writes that Steinem's most notable discovery in writing this book, "was the realization that the Iroquois Confederacy of six major northeastern tribes `inspired the structure of the U.S. Constitution, a fact only recently acknowledged in legal history,' its matrilineal society inspired the suffragist movement." Holt's account continues: "`The Iroquois guaranteed the social and political power of women to such an extent,' says Steinem, `That suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who talked and listened to women from the nearby tribes, were able to imagine a life of equality they had never known.'" (Holt, 2)

Steinem's speech at Wellesley provided the gist for the beginning of Lefkowitz's Wall Street Journal review of The Menace of Multiculturalism:

Does the U.S. Constitution owe more to the 18th-century Iroquois than it does to the ancient Greeks? No, but many younger people may answer yes, because it is what they have learned in school. The history that children learn is not necessarily a record of what actually happened in the past; rather, it is often an account of what parents and teachers believe they ought to know. (Lefkowitz, A-16)

Later in her review, Lefkowitz wrote that "However impressive the governmental organization of the Iroquois nation, the inspiration behind the Constitution may once again be credited to the European Enlightenment, and the ancient Greeks . . . " (Lefkowitz, A-16) Lefkowitz, the author of Not Out of Africa, a widely quoted critique of Afrocentric education, is much more practiced at protecting the Greeks from purported African influences than shielding the United States' founders from Iroquois ones. Replying to Lefkowitz in the Wall Street Journal's letters column April 10, 1997, I said that giving credit to the Iroquois does not demean classical Greek or English precedents for United States basic law, but "simply add[s] an Iroquois role to the picture." I concluded: "We can have our Greeks, and our Iroquois, too." (Johansen, A-15)

A week after his letter was published, I found a message in my e-mail inbox from Professor Lefkowitz, who acknowledged my main point: that we can study the Iroquois system and its impact on subsequent history without packing up the Greek and the Magna Carta and sending them, along with the rest of Europe's classical history, back across the ocean. She also thanked me for sources on the debate, and said that she had modified Not Out of Africa in paperback to take account of criticism. "I never doubted that the Iroquois and other Native Americans gave ideas to the European settlers," she wrote. "All I was questioning was the proportion."

During these exchanges, we seemed to be seeking a middle ground where a consensus of our history may settle, with regard to Native American influences, once the debates have been had and the feathers have flown, at the beginning of a new millennium on the Christian calendar. The middle ground that we seemed to be seeking also has been explored tentatively by Peter D. Salins in his book Assimilation, American Style (1997).

As Americans were differentiating themselves from their nominal or actual English ancestors in the realm of ideas, attitudes, and values, whatever remained of English cultural influences was also being progressively diluted by their contact with an ever-expanding array of non-English peoples. First, the European settlers were changed by contact with the real "native" Americans . . . who introduced them to new foods, new arts and crafts, new modes of shelter, new strategies for survival in the wilderness, and perhaps even some important civic principles. (Salins, 90)

Vine Deloria, Jr.'s critique of the debate traces its intensity in our time more to academic power politics than to a search for historical veracity. "This fight over the Six Nations' influence has been a bitter one, and if it had been submitted to a jury for fair deliberation the anthropological profession would now be paying reparations to the Six Nations, for the evidence and the argument weigh heavily in favor of the Iroquois and their supporters." (Biolsi, 215)

In The Journal of the West, Deloria responded to concerns expressed by Francis Paul Prucha in the January, 1995 issue of the same publication that

The gap is widening, I fear, between solid historical accounts and the pseudohistorical or mythical accounts adopted and proclaimed by many Indians and their white advocates. . . . A good example, which has been around from [sic] some years, is the effort to make the Iroquois Confederacy the [sic] model for the United States Constitution and American democratic government. Books and articles advancing these claims have appeared, and they have been refuted by knowledgeable scholars . . . but the idea continues to get support. . . . The differences between the Iroquois League and the Constitution are numerous and significant, but even granting similarities, to conclude that one was the model for the other is a simple post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. (Prucha, 3-4)

Instead, wrote Deloria, "The truth is that the discipline of historical writing is beginning to move from its centuries-long simplistic doctrinal interpretation of history as a good white man-bad Indian scenario." Deloria believes that "The real issue underlying Prucha's complaint is based on authority and status. His examples of revisionist, and presumably inaccurate, history and his descriptive language illustrate what I would call the pitiful complaint and anguish of the old orthodoxy." (Deloria, 3-4) Deloria then outlines the idea that the Iroquois helped shape democratic thought, and says that such ideas "were not refuted" by Prucha, "They were simply attacked." Deloria continues: "The point that the old school apparently misses is that one of the critical issues faced by the constitutional generation was the distribution of sovereign political powers between the new federal government and the colonies . . . " The Six Nations had long since resolved this problem, he believes. " . . . [I]t seems absurd to continue to maintain that the founding fathers choose the course they did out of sheer genius." Deloria scoffs, as well, as the belief that "Andrew Jackson was the best friend Indians ever had," a reference to earlier writings by Prucha. He concludes: "Scholars should not worry that pristine historical study is undermined by new ideas or efforts to correct ancient wrongs. That is the nature of continuing scholarship." (Deloria, 3-4, emphasis in original)


FURTHER READING:

Armstrong, Virginia Irving. I Have Spoken: American History Through the Voices of the Indians. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971.

Beals, Katie and John J. Carusone. Native Americans: The Constitution of the Iroquois League. Oakland, California: United School District, 1972.

Beauchamp, William M. Civil, Religious, and Mourning Councils and Ceremonies of Adoption of the New York Indians. New York State Museum Bulletin No. 113. Albany, N.Y.: New York State Education Department, June, 1907.

Biolsi, Thomas and Larry J. Zimmerman, eds. Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.

Bork, Robert H. Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. San Francisco: ReganBooks/HarperCollins, 1996.

Brownell, Charles de Wolf. The Indian Races of America: A General View. Boston: Dayton and Wentworth, 1855.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. "The Western Forum: The Struggle for Authority." Journal of the West 34:3(July, 1995), pp. 3-4.

Foreman, Jonathan. "Film I: Big Bad Brits (and Other Myths)." National Review, April 20, 1998.

Frum, David. "Champions of Native Rights Spin Fabrications About the Past: Let's Set the Record Straight on Native History." The Financial Post (Ottawa), February 7, 1998, p. 20.

George, Doug (Kanentiio). "The Founding Date for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy." Syracuse Herald-American, Editorial pages, May 17, 1998.

Hipwell, Bill. "Apology Should Have Been a Thank You." The Financial Post [Ottawa] February 3, 1998, p. 18.

Holt, Patricia. "Steinem Edits a History of U.S. Women." San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 1998, p. 2 "Sunday Review."

Hoshikawa, Jun. Pacific Rim Innernet Journeys: Wisdom of the Mongoloid Indigenous Peoples. Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 1997.

Hoxie, Frederick. "Ethnohistory in a Tribal World." Ethnohistory 44:4(Fall, 1997), pp. 595-616.

Johansen, Bruce E. "The Iroquois: Present at the Birth." Wall Street Journal [Letter to the editor], April 10, 1997, p. A-15.

Lefkowitz, Mary. "Out of Many, More Than One." Wall Street Journal, March 24, 1997, p. A-16.

McCaslin, John. "Inside the Beltway: the Great Pumpkin Speaks." Washington Times, October 26, 1995, p. A-5.

McLuhan, T.C. Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence. New York: Outerbridge and Lazard, 1971.

Moquin, Wayne. Great Documents in American Indian History. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973.

Morgan, Lewis Henry. League of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois. [1851] New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922.

O'Connor, John. "Bill That Would Remove `Subjective' Questions from ISAP Advances." Copley News Service, March 11, 1998. [in LEXIS]

Parker, Arthur C. "The Constitution of the Five Nations," in William N. Fenton, ed., Parker on the Iroquois. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968.

Palmer, Rose. The North American Indians: An Account of the American Indians North of Mexico, Compiled from the Original Sources. Volume Four of the Smithsonian Scientific Series. [1929] Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution, 1934.

Parker, Ely S. "Address to the New York State Historical Society, May 27, 1847," in Ely S. Parker Papers, Reel 1, American Philosophical Society.

Prucha, Francis Paul. "Western Forum: The Challenge of Indian History." The Journal of the West 34:1(January, 1995), pp. 3-4.

Salins, Peter D. Assimilation, American Style. San Francisco: New Republic/HarperCollins, 1997.

Schmidt, Alvin J. The Menace of Multiculturalism. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997.

Schlafly, Phyllis. "National Standards Mean National Control." Copley News Service, September 9, 1997 [in LEXIS].

Snow, Dean R. The Iroquois. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1994.

Starna, William A. and George R. Hamell. "History and the Burden of Proof: The Case of the Iroquois Influence on the U.S. Constitution." New York History, October, 1996, 427-452.

Steinem, Gloria, Wilma Mankiller, Marysa Navarro, Barbara Smith, and Wendy Mink, eds. Reader's Guide to U.S. Women's History. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998.