I have written some posts about how John Locke studied the history of government among the American Indians. From his reading of Jose de Acosta and Gabriel Sagard, he learned that there were at least three stages in the evolutionary history of government in Indigenous America.
First, among the pure hunter-gatherer Indians, there were no formal governmental institutions, but there were informal leaders selected by the people of each band to mediate disputes and to lead them in war. Second, among the horticultural tribes, there was a government by councils, in which leaders would have to win the consent of the council members for any decision. In these first two stages, people enjoyed the freedom that came from government by popular consent that looked like a kind of democracy.
Acosta's third stage was that of autocratic monarchy or empire--like that of the Incas or the rule of Montezuma in Mexico. Originally, this was a "moderate rule" that is the best, in which the kings and nobles acknowledged that their subjects were "equal by nature and inferior only in the sense that they have less obligation to care for the public good." But later this monarchic rule became tyrannical as the rulers treated their subjects as slaves and treated themselves as gods (Acosta, 346, 359, 402).
This political history of the American Indians confirms David Stasavage's claim that both democracy and autocracy are natural but not inevitable in human history.
Recently, there have been two general histories of the North American Indians--Pekka Hamalainen's Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America and Kathleen DuVal's Native Nations: A Millenium in North America. And they both provide further confirmation for this political history of the American Indians as moving from democracy to autocracy and then back to democracy.
The ancestors of the first people to settle North America came from Upper Paleolithic populations in Siberia and East Asia. As early as 30,000 years ago, or as late as 14,000 years ago, they migrated into North America by crossing the Bering Land Bridge, and then they probably traveled by boat along the west coast of North America, until some of their descendants reached South America within a few thousand years (Raff 2022).
For thousands of years, these first American Indians lived as egalitarian hunter-gatherer-fishers in bands with informal leaders whose power depended on persuasion rather than coercion.
Somewhere between nine and six thousand years ago, people in the Mesoamerican highlands domesticated corn from the wild grass teosinte. By 1500 BCE, there is evidence for the systematic cultivation of corn and agrarian village settlements.
Through trading networks, corn seeds from Mesoamerica reached the North American Southwest around 2000 BCE. Through a long history of domestication, corn evolved into the maiz de ocho variety. And by 500 CE, farmers were growing beans and squash along with maiz de ocho. These three domesticated plants became the staples for food production in North America.
A climate shift brought rising global temperatures around 900 CE (the Medieval Warm Period), which lengthened growing seasons and supported more intensive and systematic farming. Eventually, this allowed for the emergence of cities with centralized power structures (Hamalainen 2022: 12-19).
In North America, the best known ancient cities are in Arizona, Illinois, and Alabama. In Arizona, it's the Hohokam (or Huhugam) people in the Sonoran Desert (1050-1400). In Illinois, it's Cahokia, near the Mississippi east of St. Louis (1000-1400). In Alabama, it's Moundville, near Tuscaloosa (1150-1400) (DuVal 2024: 7-40).
At the peak of their power, these cities were highly centralized power structures ruled by elite chiefs and priests exercising religious, political, and economic dominance over the commoners. The ultimate source of authority was the claim of the rulers to have access to a sacred realm of supernatural beings. "Chiefs and priests knew--or claimed to know--how to communicate with other-than-human beings and to control the sun, the Earth, seasons, rains, crops, and game" (Hamalainen 2022: 18). This power of the rulers extended even into the afterlife. For example, at Cahokia, to accompany elite people in death, hundreds of commoners could be ritually sacrificed and buried in mass graves.
But then there was another climate shift around 1300 towards colder, drier, and more unstable weather (the Little Ice Age). Harvests began to fail, and famines became more common. The elite rulers of the large, centralized agrarian cities lost their supernatural power over the natural forces that determined the success or failure of farming. The O'odham descendants of the Hohokam people have stories in their oral tradition about ancient people rising up to overthrow their rulers who could no longer provide prosperity.
By 1400, the cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and Hohokam were abandoned. People no longer wanted to live in centralized hierarchical cities ruled by elites. Trade, religion, and politics became more democratized in that people lived in small bands and tribal communities where decisions were made by popular consensus (Hamalainen 2022: 12-24; DuVal 2024: 41-74).
At this point, North America became what Hamalainen has called "The Egalitarian Continent." And this is the continent that the European colonists saw. All across Native North America, the Europeans saw a remarkably egalitarian and democratic style of politics among the Indians.
For example, when the British missionary David Jones journeyed through the Shawnee towns north of the Ohio River in 1772-1773, he reported:
They look on it that God made them free--that one man has no natural right to rule over another. In this point, they agree with our greatest politicians, who affirm that a ruler's authority extends no further than the PLEASURE of the people. . . . Every town has its head men, some of whom are by us called kings; but by what I can learn, this appellation is by the Indians given to none, only as they learned it from us. The chief use of their head-men is to give counsel, especially in the time of war (Jones 1774: 54).
This confirmed what Locke had seen a hundred years earlier in the European reports about the Indians, who originally lived as free people who were ruled only by those leaders to whom all individuals had consented (ST, 103-107).
REFERENCES
DuVal, Kathleen. 2024. Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. New York: Random House.
Hamalainen, Pekka. 2022. Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America. New York: Liveright Publishing.
Jones, David. 1774. A Journal of Two Visits Made to Some Nations of Indians on the West Side of the River Ohio, in the Years 1772 and 1773. Burlington, NJ: Isaac Collins.
Raff, Jennifer. 2022. Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas. New York: Twelve.
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