Hi Friend,

Histories echo into the now. Different present moments, like different canyons, illicit different kinds of echoes. 

In this particular crevice of time, there are many echoes from multiple moments. Some of the news in the past week reminds me of 1933 (Germany). Of Rome. Of the Crusades. Of many different moments in American history. Mostly, as I often do at this time of year, I've been mulling over the 1770s, and what we refer to as the birth of America, as this is my country's 249th birthday.   I love that there have been more in-person readings of Frederick Douglas' much beloved "What To the slave is Fourth of July?" (this link has some great readings of this speech by his descendants). 

In this week's missive, I'm sharing some of the history from that moment with you. Wherever you are reading this, perhaps in Ireland or India or next to the Salish Sea, you might find some of these histories relevant. Striking. At least interesting.  

Whilst in the midst of writing this email, our friend Caroline Casey, who hosts a radio show 'The Visionary Activist' on KPFA, called me, and asked if Krissy and I could talk on her show about the indigenous roots of democracy.  Krissy couldn't make that particular time, but I could, so the two of us bantered and shared stories Thursday night. You might want to listen to it here. 

(And: if you have a chance to fill out our survey on Origins of Democracy for 2026, that would be really great. You don't have to be American - these questions are global questions!)

First of course, there is always the question of how to engage with history. How to look at it to begin with.

In my teaching, I like to use the idea of "dragonfly eye seeing": learning to see with multiple perspectives. Sometimes a dragonfly lands on a lily, sometimes on a cattail, sometimes on a particularly still human. Their many eyes see in many directions.

Humans, of course, only have two eyes. We are such limited creatures.

But our imagination? How many perspectives might our imagination have?

Always, the present shapes how we see the past.  

Sometimes the past feels like a puzzle. I pick up a piece - a quote, a pamphlet, a relic, a story - and I turn it around. Often, I can't turn it all the way around; I am limited by how much I can see. How much can I understand the speaker or the maker, or the person who wrote it down? Who knows what was left out of the record? Sometimes it is an embodied experience - holding a letter, walking amongst graves, seeing a living ceremony today - that opens an understanding.

For example, one of the common short-simple-stories is that the US Founding Fathers had a series of interactions with members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that helped to inspire our current democratic forms of governance (especially the separation of powers and the value of unity) but they left out two really important pieces: the role of women and the critical importance of always respecting Earth.

Now none of that is the story you will hear from the current Administration, which will utterly dismiss the truth that indigenous peoples had anything to do with the founding of this great (white) nation.

But they did, and it behooves us, in this time of unravelling, to ensure that we do not loose these threads. 

When Krissy and I were teaching our 'What Lies Beneath' course, we went much further into 'what was missing' - an entire cosmovision, which shapes the Great Law of Peace. Which inspired some of the processes, procedures, symbols, structures, and values/culture of the US democracy ... though certainly not all.

At the time we were most recently co-teaching this material - this was, oh, perhaps a year and a half ago - I kept thinking that not only did the Founding Fathers leave out women and the Earth, they also left out the power of grief and condolence and the importance of ongoing gratitude.

Then, during the 10 day grief/death ceremony for Krissy's son, Rahnekawę'rih Montgomery Hill kehe', (with whom we did last year's really cool fourth of July dialogue with and that recording is now up and available - see below), I kept thinking about it.

This is a culture that knows about grief. About loss. About mourning. About death - and living.

It's deep in the stories of the Great Law of Peace. The Peacemaker, they say, came to the Peoples of the Longhouse (the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) whilst the Peoples were in the midst of great warfare between themselves. Every step of the Peacemakers' journey was one wherein he was engaging with the impact violence - especially of grief. He took time to be with people's grief, and to help their minds to be able to come together again.  Grief, condolence, and gratitude are all fundamental to the Great Law of Peace. 

As I witnessed the 10-day ceremony for Krissy's son, where one clan helped another clan through their period of grief, I felt that sense even more powerfully. Working with grief is part of how we bring people back from the edge of chaos. If you support someone else in their grief process, you come to understand them. It's hard to fight against people whom you understand their heartache. 

Grief-tending as a form of peacemaking? Wow. 

Grief-tending as a form of nation-building? What an elegant approach. 

I don't see 'ways of working with one another's personal grief' really made it into the Declaration of Independence. Or the Constitution. Or the culture of America.

Because of my embodied experience of that particular ritual, I am more attuned to this part of the past-present.  

Back to the Founding Fathers and the 1700s ...when 20% of the population of the colonies were people who were forced into slavery - most assuredly, these founders were not especially egalitarian!

So here is this big piece - really a great big puzzle all by itself, multi-dimensional, filled with different stories and different moments - of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's contribution to what we now call democracy. 

Starting the story of America/democracy in the late 1700s is really starting in the middle. Even late.

We can start long, long before Europeans arrived in the Americas. We can start with creation stories - so many of which, as Paula Gunn Allen argues in her book, A medicine woman's sourcebook, stem from what she refers to as 'cosmogyny': creation stories that center the sacred feminine. Including but not only from the Haudenosaunee. 

And we can also start in the early 1600s, when European colonists and their missionaries encountered and dialogued with Americans, including a lot of super smart philosophers (aka Native folks) some of whom had a fair amount of leisure and who quickly analyzed the European cultures even as European missionaries analyzed them.

And that analysis? That analysis changed Europe. And America.

In the book, The Dawn of Everything, the authors write:

"Not only did indigenous Americans - confronted with strange foreigners - gradually develop their own, surprisingly consistent critique of European institutions, but these critiques came to be taken very seriously in Europe itself.

Just how serious can hardly be overstated. For European audiences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, once disclosed, could hardly be ignored. Indeed, the ideas expressed in that critique came to be perceived as such a menace to the fabric of European society that an entire body of theory was called into being, specifically to refute them. As we will shortly see, the whole story we summarized in the last chapter - our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex - was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

The first thing to emphasize is that ‘the origin of social inequality is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the (European) middle ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning…. A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus. So one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.

The terms only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World."

Equality was just one of the notions from America that changed Europe.

Just as important were the notions of freedom and independence.

Indeed, for the Christian missionaries, such as the Jesuits at the time, the freedom that they saw horrified them: they associated it with animals. Here's how one Jesuit, Le Jeune, put it in 1642 when he was amongst the Montagnais-Naskapi peoples:

"They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild as colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of the chief is in his tongue's end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent."

In other words: the people are not afraid of some kind of violent repercussion if they disagree with their leader.  No police state.

There are other forms of justice than the prison-industrial complex. Or concentration camps on swamplands, for that matter.

Back in the 1600s Europe, these were novel concepts in their world of kings and popes and a society that had so much hierarchy that they had lost track of how to even imagine a world without it. Which is not to say Europe (a huge and diverse range of cultures and peoples) never had their own version of town hall meetings - they certainly did, especially at local levels. But it was not the practice of the kingdoms who had already consumed their own forests, and were hungry for more trees to make more ships to do more fighting.

Could the French Revolution have happened without this critique of hierarchy? Without living proof that equality is possible?

Regardless of the answer to such impossible questions, we can't deny the tremendous contribution... the ways that indigenous cultures' social arrangements influenced what became the creation of the modern era.

Which, because of a lot of other influences, also led to the destruction of many indigenous ways of living.

History is not particularly simple... nor especially linear - there's a lot of  sideways cycles coming around in weird ways. And this story sure as heck isn't finished!

Certainly we can see the power of living examples of non-authoritarian societies.... many of whom not only centered the divine feminine, but enjoyed a really good life.

#nokings.  

That freedom and independence that Europeans associated with Americans?

That comes from a deep culture of what we might, for simplicity sake, refer to as interdependence.  (One where there was a strong appreciation for how deeply dependent we are all are on one another).

Increasingly, I understand that independence arises from interdependence.  

It's not the other way around. We don't start of with independence and then get to interdependence. Just check out basic biology: it takes two people (two parents) to make one person (a baby).

We always arise from a collective; and to the collective we always return. 

From dust to dust and ashes to ashes... this phrase spoken at many modern funerals stems from Genesis 3:19. In the Hebrew, the phrase is 'afar le-afar', which can be translated also as 'from earth to earth, as in, from the earth you came and to earth you shall return'

That's just the nature of nature. aka: reality.

We are at a time when a lot of things- including much of the basics of democracy, which includes the limited power of the executive branch and that no person is above the law  - are being actively dismantled.    Most likely, some things will rise again (eventually) and some will not.

In this time of unravelling and re-shuffling, what pieces are we going to hold up to the light? Are we going to be able to weave some of these other pieces in to our stories of who we are in ways that are actually helpful?

Earthseed, how will you change?

Blessings on your day, however you choose to engage with this moment, and with our quickly changing world.

- Sara Jolena

Reminder that you might like the recordings from the last two years: