Solartopia.org

The People’s Spiral

of US History

From Jigonsaseh

to Solartopia…

to Life after Trump

By Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman

Chapter 1 Excerpt

Our Indigenous DNA

Mother Earth’s Matriarchs Nurture Our Nation

 
Our Mother is an Indigenous matriarch
In her womb our nation was conceived.  
Her beloved daughter Jigonsaseh was the true mother of American democracy…and of our federal union.  
Everything American is rooted amongst the countless diverse societies that were here so long before Columbus.  
Now a revived matriarchy is poised for rebirth.  And not a moment too soon!   
 
Women ran much of native North America.  They raised the kids, chose the chiefs, shaped our Indigenous DNA.  Said the Hopi…
 
…the family, the dwelling house and the field are inseparable, because the woman is the heart of these, and they rest with her.  Among us the family traces its kin from the mother, hence all its possessions are hers.
 
The man builds the house but the woman is the owner, because she repairs and preserves it; the man cultivates the field, but he renders its harvest into the woman’s keeping, because upon her it rests to prepare the food and the surplus of stores for barter depends upon her thrift. 
 
Formed as early as 1140AD, the matriarchal “Iroquois Confederacy” was the cradle of our civilization.  Its laws comprise our Indigenous Originalism. 
Its spiritual founder was Deganawidah, the Haudenosaunee Peacemaker.  Amidst a terrible war, he found the great orator Ayawentha mourning in the woods.  Legend says this exalted Onondaga chief was grieving his wife and three daughters.
Their death in war was rare.  Much Indigenous warfare was mere ritual that stopped with first blood.  Victorious tribes often adopted captured women and children.  Reports of indigenous rape are virtually nonexistent.  White prisoners often chose to “go native.”  
 
But for eons, across what’s now upstate New York, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onandaga, Cayuga, and Seneca were constantly at war.  These early Haudenosaunee (People of the Long House) often tortured their male captives, then ate the hearts of the bravest.

Their guerrilla tactics changed the world.  They shot from behind trees, struck as the spirit moved them, then slipped away to regroup and return. 

They improvised in tune with Mother Nature.  Had the Indigenous been immune to the European diseases that reduced their numbers by more than 90%, the whites could NEVER have marched across the continent as they did.  
Had the Europeans opened their minds to the wisdom of the Indigenous cultures, this would be a far healthier planet.  Had they cooperated instead of conquered (learned instead of slaughtered) we would be an infinitely greater nation.  Our species would have a far better chance to survive on this planet. 

While Europe emerged from the Dark Ages amidst constant warfare, the Five Nations found harmony. 

The Peacemaker was a stutterer.  Ayawentha spoke his heart.  But as they united the tribes, it took the powerful, beloved matriarch Jigonsaseh to at last comb the snakes from the head of Tadodaho, the fearsome, ferocious Onandaga war chief who’d made peace seem impossible. 

With epic patience and diplomacy, the three Peacemakers made Tadodaho the new leader of a sophisticated alliance joining Five Nations who’d been forever at war.  They convened America’s first Congress, then laid the foundation of a stable, advanced democracy that would keep the peace for centuries.

The newcomer French called the Haudenosaunee “Iroquois”…a serpentine slur.  Their governmental genius is still studiously ignored by our mainstream historians. 
But the Haudenosaunee formed humankind’s purest democracy.  While the emerging states of Europe suffered through warring tyrannies of absolute, inbred, often idiotic monarchs, the Iroquois Union was based on consensual harmony.  
The Five Nations sent fifty chiefs to a central council.  Representation was based on local head counts.  The many tribes kept their traditional structures, but collaborated under the Great Law of Peace.   Individual liberties were sacred, carefully spelled out in the 117 codicils that preceded our own first Ten Amendments.
While the men hunted, fished and pontificated, the tribal matriarchs prepared the food, kept the fires, raised the kids.  Did they run the show?  Charles C. Mann seems to think not….
 
It is the general consensus of anthropologists and archaeologists that there are  no known examples of societies where women had more political and social power than men.
 
There were certainly North American tribes run by men.  But among (at least) the Iroquois, Cherokee and Hopi, such doubters might get a memorable feminist earful.  In the tradition of Jigonsaseh, the women chose the chiefs….and could remove them.  Letting the men blab away “makes them feel important,” smiled Audrey Shenandoah, a modern Haudenosaunee matriarch.  “It gives them something to do.” 
The whole thing, said Ben Franklin, “runs better than the British Parliament.”
Maybe 15 million Indigenous inhabited North America before Columbus.  Maybe 100 million peopled the western hemisphere, maybe more.

In what’s now the US, a thousand bands, tribes, clans, nations, confederacies spoke more than 500 languages.  Sophisticated in their diversity, each had its own culture, traditions, belief systems, worldview.

…please continue reading the rest at THE PEOPLE SPIRAL OF US HISTORY….