An original work of political theory, The Iroquois and the Athenians relocates the problem of political foundations and origins, removing it from the dead logic of the social contract and grafting it onto a juxtaposed representation of the historical practices of the pre-contact Iroquois and the pre-classical Greeks.

Introductory courses in political philosophy would benefit from the incorporation of material on the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, including the story of the foundation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Classroom study of this tradition will serve several purposes: introducing a valuable account of political phenomena such as negotiation, consensus, veto, and rational communication; contributing to the diversity of syllabi; tracing the influence of Iroquois law on Western political institutions; and comparing the Haudenosaunee story to early modern social contract (...) theory, especially Hobbes’ Leviathan. This paper draws connections to relevant topics in a standard, historically-oriented course and suggests learning resources and objectives. (shrink)

James Tully and others have argued recently that the theory of property Locke defends in the Second Treatise was designed to justify European settlement on the lands of North American Natives. If this view becomes generally accepted, and Tuck suggests it will be, doubts may arise about the impartiality of Lockean property theories. Locke, as is well established and documented again by Tully, had huge vested interests in the European settlement of North America and possibly in the enslavement of Native (...) Peoples. Doubts about Locke may reflect on all rights theories of property and thus bring into question ‘one of the major political philosophies of the modem world’. Raising these doubts is part of Tully's declared intention. His article tries to show that the Native systems of property and government which Locke defines away as illegitimate are in fact interesting and potentially beneficial alternatives to Lockean individual rights theories. (shrink)

Heidegger’s representation of Dasein’s death relation in Division Two of Being and Time remains a singularly prominent reflection on death in the canon of twentieth century continental philosophy. At the same time, though, it is a representation whose limitations have been established by commitments made in Division One, specifically in Heideggers’s account of being-with. My interests in this paper are in the intimate relation between intersubectivity and death, and I engage in a comparative phenomenology in order to free things up. (...) More specifically, I provide a critique of certain key aspects of Heidegger’s account of Dasein, and then I contrast this with the radically different way that the Iroquois practice and experience the connection between intersubjecivity and death. The Iroquois tribe establish their connection between themselves through formal condolences rituals. As I articulate in the paper, for the Iroquois, the relationship to the dead is the source of my relations with those who are living. Dead people are not just an anonymous “they,” and the words said about them are not just idle chatter, but the source of responsibility to continue the community. (shrink)

Inspired by Nietzsche’s insistence that we exploit actual history and Foucault’s extrapolation of Nietzsche’s project, my explication of the logic of originary withdrawal is centered around an analysis of an historical account of origin; here, we turn to the image of the original lawgiver, as depicted in the Iroquois foundation narrative, the narrative that serves to constitute their political community. This analysis helps to cultivate an alternative understanding of political necessity by starting with the traces of a material discourse (...) from the past and, more important, about the past rather than starting with theory. (shrink)

The shift from a traditional indigenous female agriculture to a new male agriculture in Iroquois culture was facilitated by the teachings of the early 19th century Seneca prophet and chief, Handsome Lake. This shift resulted in the disempowerment of women and occurred during a period of crises for the Iroquois; it was heavily influenced by exogenous pressures that, mediated by Handsome Lake's Code, led not only to a change of sex roles in agriculture but also to a shift (...) in family structure toward the patriarchal family and to a change of ideology toward a patriarchal monotheism. Previously, Iroquois life and ideology had stressed a complementarity or balance of powers between the sexes. Handsome Lake's Code also retained certain aspects of the older Iroquois lifestyle and ideology. The crises undergone by the Iroquois might have been met differently, without the disempowerment of women, had it not been for exogenous influences. (shrink)

Since the fourteenth century, Eastern Woodlands tribes have used delicate purple and white shells called “wampum” to form intricately woven belts. These wampum belts depict significant moments in the lives of the people who make up the tribes, portraying everything from weddings to treaties. Wampum belts can be used as a form of currency, but they are primarily used as a means to record significant oral narratives for future generations. In Reading the Wampum, Kelsey provides the first academic consideration of (...) the ways in which these sacred belts are reinterpreted into current Haudenosaunee tradition. While Kelsey explores the aesthetic appeal of the belts, she also provides insightful analysis of how readings of wampum belts can change our understanding of specific treaty rights and land exchanges. Kelsey shows how contemporary Iroquois intellectuals and artists adapt and reconsider these traditional belts in new and innovative ways. Reading the Wampum conveys the vitality and continuance of wampum traditions in Iroquois art, literature, and community, suggesting that wampum narratives pervade and reappear in new guises with each new generation. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Our Obligations to the Natural Environment Eight Perceptions of the Natural World Environmental Crises: A Short Catalog of Bad News Case 3: Great Apes as Bushmeat Notes.

Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America. Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West (...) Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as "fit for swine," became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine. While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade among the colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a "culinary declaration of independence," prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define American cuisine. McWilliams demonstrates that this was a shift not so much in new ingredients or cooking methods, as in the way Americans imbued food and cuisine with values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day. (shrink)

This guest column consists of a tongue-in-cheek counterfactual history of England from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its highlight is the fifty-year reign of the saintly King Richard III, who dies a martyr in New York at the hands of the Iroquois in 1536 and is promptly canonized. In this version of events, England evades the Reformation and the wars of religion and enters modernity as a prosperous nation of small farmers who have no interest in enclosures and (...) engrossing, let alone in capitalism and industrialization. (shrink)

While the idea of applying Optimality Theory to kinship has potential, this commentary draws attention to problems with the constraints proposed. Particularly, Distinguish Matrikin appears to recapitulate an error of linking matrilineal descent to Iroquois kinship too closely and more generally mixing descent with true kinship parameters.

What are the theoretical implications of a universal genealogy? After the demise of relativism in kinship studies, there is much to be gained by joining old formal-structural analysis of kinship to recent cognitive-evolutionary approaches. This commentary shows how the logic of kinship terminologies, specifically those of the Seneca-Iroquois, can be clarified by looking at the relationship between opposite-sex/same-sex sibling pairs.

From 1922 to 1924, the Iroquois Confederacy — a federal union of six aboriginal nations — sought resolution of a dispute between themselves and Canada at the League of Nations. In this paper, the historical events of the 1920s League are employed as a case study to explore the development of the international society of states in the early 20th century as it relates to the indigenous peoples of North America. Specifically, it will be argued that the early modern (...) practice of excluding Amerindians from international political forums is related to the negative representation of indigenous peoples in the dominant theoretical discourse of the time: social contract theory. The diplomatic activities of the Iroquois, and the members of the League during this time period, demonstrate exactly how social contract theory has relied on presenting indigenous peoples as residing in a non-political and non-sovereign form, thus denying them the right to participate at the international level on par with other peoples. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Everything is Breath":Critical Plant Studies' Metaphysics of MixtureElisabeth Weber (bio)In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin W. Kimmerer contrasts two creation stories that are thoroughly incompatible. One starts with an all-powerful male creator calling the world and its vegetation and animals into existence through words, and forming the first human beings from clay; the other starts with Skywoman tumbling through the (...) air with seeds in her fist from the Tree of Life growing in Skyworld. One ends with the condemnation of woman to give birth in "very severe" pains, with the cursing of the ground ordered to "produce thorns and thistles" as punishment for man who will eat his food only after "painful toil," and the expulsion from the garden; the other ends in gratitude for the collective caring of the animals, with the creation of "a garden for the well-being of all." One includes an original fall from grace whose burden will be passed down from generation to generation; the other acknowledges suffering without a trace of the burden of unearned guilt. One predicts death as a return to the dust from whence mankind was created; the other imagines death as becoming plant and fruit, as becoming gift, a rejoining the spirits of all ancestors, human and others, who surround the living in everything that is. The threat of one is the inexorability of a trajectory "from dust to dust" and the latter's association, with Plato, of something so diffuse that it doesn't merit a concept or idea; the promise of the other is an abiding relationship with all that is, the reciprocity of giving and gratitude, and the gladly assumed responsibility for the "inspirited" land.Kimmerer comments:Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road [...].1 [End Page 117]Cosmologies express collective imaginairies that have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years. The Iroquois story recounted and rendered accessible by Kimmerer is one of countless creation stories that constitute an "important genre in many preliterate traditions" (Zolbrod 5). Kimmerer suggests that even though the Judeo-Christian creation story may have receded into the background of Western collective consciousness, it plays a role in the planet's devastation. What strikes the reader in the story of Skywoman is the centrality of reciprocity, of relation, and, as the woman's name indicates, the significance of the sky. While this might mean, on planet Earth, the atmosphere–the Earth's sky is blue because of the surrounding atmosphere–the implications of the sky's preponderance reach beyond the planetary into the cosmological. The "sky is not what is above. The sky is everywhere: it is the space and the reality of mixture and movement, the definite horizon starting from which everything has to draw itself" (Coccia 218-219) in order to breathe and live.In order to continue to breathe, breathe in the long-term, the long-term, that is, as Barbara Kingsolver put it in one of her poems, "from a tree's / way of thinking" (7), non-human kin's "way of thinking" will need to play a role in humans' self-understanding. Kyle Whyte underlines that it is not enough to respond with urgency to specific ecological crises (fires, flooding, etc.) alone, but, rather, "urgency must be aimed at addressing ecological and relational tipping points together":U.S. settler colonialism, for example, in a short period of time, inflicted displacement, drastic ecological changes, and lost or disrupted relationships with hundreds of species that indigenous peoples depended on through kinship ties for generations. These changes are more extreme than what many nonindigenous persons fear most about moving beyond... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Environmental PhilosophyJ. Baird Callicott (bio)The old guy in The Graduate had just one word for Dustin Hoffman's character, Ben: "plastics." This old guy has three words for the future pursuit of environmental philosophers, young and old: global climate change (GCC).GCC is emerging as the central environmental concern of the 21st century. Back in the 20th century, E. O. Wilson's mantra was (I paraphrase) 'abrupt mass anthropogenic (...) species extinction is the crime for which posterity is least likely to forgive us.' In view of the multifaceted catastrophe graphically depicted in the recent acclaimed film, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), Wilson's dictum seems quaint. Rather, a world whose very geography will be anthropogenically altered by risen sea levels, whose weather will be increasingly violent and erratic, whose seas will be stagnant and acidified by carbonic acid, etc., etc., is the crime for which posterity is least likely to forgive us—if there is any posterity to make a judgment.According to Al Gore in AIT anthropogenic GCC is a "moral" and "ethical" issue. But he doesn't elaborate. And at the end of the film he provides a lame list of things you and you and you and you—all of us individually AND voluntarily—can do to mitigate GCC, such as swap out halogen light bulbs for compact florescent ones and drive a hybrid car. Think "tragedy of the commons" for the efficacy of that approach to an adequate ethical response to the challenge of GCC.Gore's naivete apart, environmental ethics (EE) as we know it is singularly ill-prepared for dealing with GCC. The problem is one of scale, temporal as well as spatial. Spatially, EE concern was focused on the scale of biotic communities, ecosystems, and landscapes. And the relevant science was ecology. Temporally, the scale was also ecological: It might take Prince William Sound half a century, perhaps even a whole century, to fully recover from the Exxon Valdez spill. In temperate climates, after a clearcut a mature forest might spring up in a century and, through ecological succession, if left alone it will return to old growth in 300 years. Back in the 20th century that seemed like a long time, and we lamented that the ecological temporal scale and the economic temporal scale of [End Page 119] industries like the timber business and the oil business were out of phase, the former measured in decades the latter in quarters. But now, elderly environmental philosophers like me will personally witness little more than the initial environmental consequences of GCC—the occasional Katrina, the occasional hottest year on record, the disappearance of glaciers in Glacier National Park. We won't live to see (I hope) the cessation of the Gulf Stream or sea-levels rise more than a few centimeters. And the rectification of these consequences will be completed, if they ever are, only after thousands of years have elapsed.How then do we scale EE up to meet the moral challenge of GCC? Spatially we have a huge leap to make from the landscape scale to the biospheric scale. We have to become conversant with a new set of sciences; the relevant sciences are not ecology and conservation biology, but biogeochemistry and earth-systems science.Is a GCC EE even possible? Maybe ethics has temporal-scale limits? We used to marvel at the long view of the Iroquois who considered the consequences of present policies out seven generations. Wow! At 25 years per generation that is all of 250 years (adding on the 75-year life-span of the 7th generation). Can we have ethical concern for the 37th generation, a thousand years out? Or the 121st generation 3000 years out?J. Baird Callicott J. Baird Callicott is Regents Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies in the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas. From 1997–2000 he served the International Society for Environmental Ethics as president. He is author, editor, or co-editor of a score of books and more than a hundred journal articles and book chapters. Callicott's research proceeds on six major fronts: theoretical environmental ethics, land ethics, the philosophy of... (shrink)

This is the first collection of all of the major philosophical works of Cadwallader Colden, one of the most accomplished intellectual and political figures in the American colonies before the Revolution. As Lieutenant Governor of New York he was intimately involved in the tumultuous political life of the times, and he represented the colonial government to the five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. His History of the Five Indian Nations was the first English history of the Iroquois and (...) a popular book both in the colonies and in Europe. A prolific letter writer, Colden corresponded with many of the major intellectuals of his day, including Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson. He also wrote extensively on a wide range of topics, including philosophy, history, the natural sciences, and mathematics. Although several of Colden's works have been available in anthologies, until now there has never been a collection of all of his philosophical writings. This anthology includes The Principles of Action in Matter, the Introduction to Phylosophy, the Introduction to The History of the Five Indian Nations, and the complete correspondence with Samuel Johnson on the subject of materialism and idealism. Also included is the first publication of Principles of Morality, written in 1745, but never published till now. For students of American philosophy, as well as those interested in the intellectual history of the colonial period, this is an essential work. (shrink)

Benjamin Franklin's social and political thought was shaped by contacts with and knowledge of ancient aboriginal traditions. Indeed, a strong case can be made that key features of the social structure eventually outlined in the United States Constitution arose not from European sources, and not full-grown from the foreheads of European-American "founding fathers", but from aboriginal sources, communicated to the authors of the Constitution to a significant extent through Franklin. A brief sketch of the main argument to this effect is (...) offered in this essay. (shrink)

Inspired by Nietzsche’s insistence that we exploit actual history and Foucault’s extrapolation of Nietzsche’s project, my explication of the logic of originary withdrawal is centered around an analysis of an historical account of origin; here, we turn to the image of the original lawgiver, as depicted in the Iroquois foundation narrative, the narrative that serves to constitute their political community. This analysis helps to cultivate an alternative understanding of political necessity by starting with the traces of a material discourse (...) from the past and, more important, about the past rather than starting with theory. (shrink)

C’est au « jeune Morgan » que cet article est consacré. En mettant en lumière la collaboration entre Lewis Henry Morgan et son informateur Ely Stone Parker, il examine une situation de rapports entre cultures vécue comme une rencontre entre des personnes. Il s’agit de restituer le contexte historique et politique de l’adoption de Morgan par les Indiens Seneca afin de donner sens à cette rencontre, en considérant les échanges qu’elle a entraînés sur les plans intellectuel, matériel et affectif, les (...) relations de parenté qu’elle a engendrées, les engagements civiques et politiques qu’elle a suscités. Le projet de documentation anthropologique s’est aussi construit dans une situation de voisinage et d’affinité.By shedding light on the collaboration between the young Lewis Henry Morgan and his informant, Ely Stone Parker, a meeting of cultures comes to be seen as a meeting between persons. The historical and political context wherein the Seneca adopted Morgan endows this encounter with a specific meaning stemming from : the intellectual, material and affective exchanges that occurred, the bonds of kinship that were engendered, and the civic and political commitments that were generated. Plans for anthropological studies are also produced by a situation of geographic propinquity. (shrink)