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Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy. By Donald A. Grinde, Jr., and Bruce E. Johansen. (Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991. xxvi + 320 pp. Paper, $15.00, ISBN 0-935626-35-2.)
Donald A. Grinde, Jr., and Bruce E. Johansen are on a mission. In their opinion, scholars have systematically overlooked the contributions of Indians to the American system of government and have thus missed the connections between Indian (particularly Iroquois) beliefs and the creation of the Constitution. Here they attempt to redress this situation.
Grinde and Johansen write that "the character of American democracy evolved importantly (although, of course, not solely) from the examples provided by the American Indian confederacies that bordered the British colonies." After treating such matters as European conceptions of the "noble savage," the book focuses on government making from the Albany Plan of Union of 1754 to the...