Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

e recognized. For example, the cultures of Africa, China, early Australia,early America, and others need to be further researched for curricularpurposes. From one point of view, two different and opposite factors seemto have come together from among the many elements that contributedto the founding of North American society. One is the eighteenth-centuryEnlightenment in Europe with its intellectual, materialistic, and utilitarianapproach to life. The other is a subtle, spiritual influence that came quietlythrough the Native North American. These two factors originally, it seems,touched hands and understood each other for a moment on an importantsocial level. But on other levels they were far apart.An example today of the persistent “enlightenment” element isprovided by a 1981 resolution of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington,D.C. Founded in 1863 under the signature of Abraham Lincoln, theAcademy is an official advisor to the federal government on any questionof science or technology. The resolution states:Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realmsof human thought whose presentation in the same context leads tomisunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief.The Native American influence is quite different and much moreimportant. When I was a boy, I was familiar with the stories about Hiawatha.Later, when I came to America, I realized that they were not just “stories,”but that Hiawatha was a chief of the Iroquois people and is thought to havelived in the sixteenth century. He was responsible for the republican constitutionof the tribes within the Iroquois confederation, which extended overNew York State and Canada. He united the five Indian “nations” within thegroup in a “silver chain” or “Grand Council” whose members succeededeach other in the female line of heredity. (The importance of the woman insociety, it is interesting to note, has been a feature of North American societyfrom earliest times to the present.)Some historians claim that Iroquois orators frequently spoke at colonialmeetings and that they suggested that the colonies form a confederationlike that of the Iroquois. It is thought that the republican spirit of the Iroquoishelped to bring about the establishment of the thirteen original states andthat it influenced Benjamin Franklin and, later, Thomas Jefferson in framingthe Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.Hiawatha is also credited with a concept of universal brotherhood.I believe that this spirit of universal brotherhood in North America has asmuch to do with the future as with the past. One could say that the first275