Plan for Today (June Session Two) ● Land Acknowledgment ● Lewis Henry Morgan ● 5-minute break at halftime ● Values of The Stockbridge Indians ● Answers to Questions from Chat messages ● General Conversation about Racism or anything else 1
Cookson Rock Piles 2
Joan's Rock Garden Project 3
Closeup; notice the cylindrical object 4
Pestle (10”) 5
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The Promise of Progress The Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan by Daniel Noah Moses ● Attorney by profession, classically educated ● He admired Seneca, the Roman Stoic, who counseled against greed & ambition ● Wanted to record the culture of the Haudenosaunee because Ivanhoe [1819] ● Sir Walter Scott set his other stories in Scotland, which [not long ago] “ was under a state of government nearly as simple and as patriarchal as those of our good allies the Mohawks and Iroquois. ” p. 22 8
Lewis Henry Morgan Major Publications (of more than 20) ● The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851) ● The American Beaver and his Works (1868) ● Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) ● "Montezuma's Dinner" (1876) ● Ancient Society (1877) ● "On the Ruins of a Stone Pueblo on the Animas River in New Mexico, with a ground plan" (1880) ● Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines (1881) ● In addition, “The Indian Journals” and “European Journal” 9
Morgan's Work Influenced Many Including ● Franz Boas (1858–1942) – https://www.biography.com/scientist/franz-boas ● Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) ● Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – The Moral Animal by 10
Lewis Henry Morgan 11
Morgan on the left, Morgan on the left, a contemporary account on the right a contemporary account on the right 12
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How the Tuscarora squeezed in 15
Topics For Discussion The Work of Henry Lewis Morgan (1818-1881) Haudenosaunee – Coda (Chapter 11) in 1491 : The Great Law of Peace Haudenosaunee “People who build a house” Hiawatha and The Peacemaker (ca.1090-1150) “People of the Longhouse” Ongweh'onweh = “Real Human Beings” Why is it the “ Mohawk ” Trail? “Communism in Living” and Utopian Communities 16
1491 Coda page 380 Chapter 11 is pages 379-392 in my paperback edition 17
Hiawatha and Tododaho The story had a great impact on Benjamin Franklin and others 18
E Pluribus Unum 19
Mann mentions the Native American leaning that no one is ● better than anyone else, which flew in the face of the European class system. p. 380 This concept of “Egalité” appealed to Lewis Henry Morgan. ● Most American cultures were matrilineal. ● “ No woman could be a war chief, no man could lead a clan. ” ● p. 382 Children were raised by the mother's family; the most important man in a child's life was his mother's brother, not his father. This arrangement struck Morgan as “primitive” and proof that the Haudenosaunee (and other Americans) had not evolved to the sophisticated level of the European- American culture. Their “Liberté” on the other hand: “ ... tradition of limited government and pesonal autonomy ● shared by many cultures north of the Río Grande. ” p.384 “ ... Thomas More, writing Utopia in 1615, situated his ● exemplary nation in the Americas. ” p.385 (actually 1516, on an island) 20
Primitive versus Civilized ● Morgan shifted anthropology from anecdote to science; Franz Boas (1858-1942) later shifted it from race to culture ● Locke and others used the (Native) Americans as examples of people living in a “state of nature” without a government ● They believed that the “state” (i.e. government) was (or should be) established “with the consent of the governed” to protect private property. ● John Locke: “in the beginning all the world was America” The Second Treatise of Government 1690 21
“Communism in Living” (Fraternité) as a barrier to social progress 22
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Religion 25
Republicanism versus Liberalism ● Morgan seemed never to have seen the conflict between Egalité (Jefferson) and Liberté (Hamilton). ● He became distressed when large corporations began to exert power ● But he never gave up his optimism 26
Fraternité (Mutual Aid) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/what-mutual-aid-can-do-during-a-pandemic There’s a certain kind of news story that is presented as heartwarming but actually evinces the ravages of American inequality under capitalism: the account of an eighth grader who raised money to eliminate his classmates’ lunch debt, or the report on a FedEx employee who walked twelve miles to and from work each day until her co-workers took up a collection to buy her a car. We can be so moved by the way people come together to overcome hardship that we lose sight of the fact that many of these hardships should not exist at all. In a recent article for the journal Social Text, the lawyer and activist Dean Spade cites news reports about volunteer boat rescues during Hurricane Harvey which did not mention the mismanagement of government relief efforts, or identify the possible climatological causes of worsening hurricanes, or point out who suffers most in the wake of brutal storms. Conservative politicians can point to such stories, which ignore the social forces that determine the shape of our disasters, and insist that voluntarism is preferable to government programs. Radicalism has been at the heart of mutual aid since it was introduced as a political idea. In 1902, the Russian naturalist and anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin—who was born a prince in 1842, got sent to prison in his early thirties for belonging to a banned intellectual society, and spent the next forty years as a writer in Europe—published the book “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.” Kropotkin identifies solidarity as an essential practice in the lives of swallows and marmots and primitive hunter-gatherers; coöperation, he argues, was what allowed people in medieval villages and nineteenth-century farming syndicates to survive. That inborn solidarity has been undermined, in his view, by the principle of private property and the work of state institutions. Even so, he maintains, mutual aid is “the necessary foundation of everyday life” in downtrodden communities, and “the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.” 27
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