Hello everyone, this is my first post on this subreddit (I've been lurking for a long time, however) and I come to you with questions about an article I read earlier today.
I'm just a junior in high school and on the Language Arts section of a standardized test I was taking today, there was a New York Times article featured where the author argued that the Iroquois Confederation heavily inspired the Founding Fathers of the United States and its government, including ideas such as separation of powers and other, broader ideas that are associated today with the United States (personal freedom, etc.). I couldn't find the exact text online that was on the test today, but I did find this article that sums up the ideas in question quite well.
History classes that I have taken, including AP US History, tend to focus much more on the effects of British policies following the French and Indian War and their contribution to American patriotism and the desire for independence, so the idea of the Iroquois and other Native American peoples directly inspiring ideas that are so associated with American colonists seems pretty radical to me.
So, my question is... how great an influence did the Iroquois Confederation and its constitution really have on the creation of the United States, its form of government, and the notions of freedom that we associate with America today?
Thank you all in advance, and I hope you can forgive my novice historian skills :)
I'm not a Revolutionary Era historian specifically, but traditional interpretations tend to point to Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among others) and providing a lot of the philosophical underpinnings that later informed the formation of a US government. The article you linked doesn't make any claim to the contrary, merely that the US looked to other examples of successful unions of separate states/nations for inspiration for their own. They looked for mechanisms of national organization and cooperation much more than abstract ideals like liberty. This, of course, does not imply that the Iroquois Constitution is irrelevant to the American form of government. It was, as the article suggests, one of many contemporary examples Americans considered when forming their own version.
Yours is actually a fantastic question because, believe it or not, it's pushing you to consider the formation of the United States in a way it's not usually considered: as an international rather than a domestic act. The original Articles of Confederation, and broader conception of a national US government, was based more on an international treaty than a solid national government (the Constitution pushed much harder in the nationalizing direction, but even then still had some international flavors to it). The United States, when it originally formed, was a small fish in a very large Atlantic pond. The system of international relations was very competitive and mercantilist, and the US was an insignificant backwater that could be made all the more insignificant if, say, Britain could convince one or two colonies to break away and form a separate alliance (France would do the same, etc etc, until the US was divided and competing with its own component parts). Early attempts at government formation were primarily concerned with simply making sure the US didn't break apart. A great book on this topic, if you're so inclined, is David Hendrickson's Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding
There's another great book by Woody Holton, called Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. It will give you a variety of ways that groups like Native Americans influenced the timing and nature of the American Revolution, as well as poor farmers, slaves, and British merchants. He discusses things like the effect of Native American conflict and resistance to British policies (Proclamation Line of 1763) and American colonists' attempts to expand westward, and how these things in turn affected calls for independence. Good stuff.