american-holocaust

28 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTters in what today are Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas,Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, residedthe Tuscarora, the Pamlico, the Secotan, the Nottaway, the Weapemeoc,the Meherrin, the Powhatan, the Susquehannock, and the Delaware-tojust begin a list that could be multiplied many times over. Beyondthem, of course, were the great Northern Iroquoian nations-the Seneca,the Oneida, the Mohawk, the Onandaga, the Cayuga, the Wenro, the Erie,the Petun, the Neutral, the Huron, and the St. Lawrence Iroquois. And theNew England Indian nations-the Pennacook, the Nipmuk, the Massachusett,the Wampanoag, the Niantic, the Nauset, the Pequot, the Mahican,the Narraganset, the Wappinger, the Mohegan, and more. Traditionallythese native peoples were thought to have lived in very thinly populatedsettlements, but recent re-analyses of their population histories suggest thatsuch separate nations as the Mohawk, the Munsee, the Massachusett, theMohegan-Pequot, and others filled their territorial areas with as many ormore residents per square mile as inhabit most western regions in the presentdayUnited States. Overall, according to one estimate, the Atlantic coastalplain from Florida to Massachusetts supported more than 2,000,000 peoplebefore the arrival of the first Europeans. 30Probably the most common association that is made with the congregationsof northeastern cultures concerns their sophisticated domestic politicalsystems and their formal networks of international alliances, such asthe Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois League, founded in the middleof the fifteenth century and composed of the independent Mohawk, Oneida,Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples. Many writers, both historiansand anthropologists, have argued that the League was a model for theUnited States Constitution, although much controversy continues to surroundthat assertion. The debate focuses largely on the extent of Iroquoisinfluence on Euro-American political thought, however, since no one deniesthere was some influence. 31 Indeed, as numerous historians have shown,overall American Indian political and social organization had a powerfulimpact on European social thought, particularly in seventeenth- andeighteenth-century France. 32 In any case, however the controversy over Iroquoisinfluence on the U.S. Constitution eventually is decided, it will notminimize the Iroquois achievement, since-as one of the originators of thenotion of a connection between the League and the Constitution, J.N.B.Hewitt of the Smithsonian Institution, admitted when he first propoundedthe hypothesis more than fifty years ago:•Some of the ideas incorporated in the League of the Five Nations were fartoo radical even for the most advanced of the framers of the American Constitution.Nearly a century and a half was to elapse before the white mencould reconcile themselves to woman suffrage, which was fundamental inthe Indian government. They have not yet arrived at the point of abolishingcapital punishment, which the Iroquois had accomplished by a very simple