Author explores Native American influence on U.S. Founding Fathers
TV NEWS ANCHORS like to preface an assessment of the despair and confusion about the world today by saying with great solemnity these are “challenging times.” They are indeed, but, when clarity is needed, the past can hold some surprising insights.
Challenging times are what forced changes in the ways people looked at religion, society, government, education, defense, communication, technology and medicine. And, no doubt, the changes being forced upon us now may not be known for a while, but they are unfolding as we speak.
Educator, ecopsychologist, political philosopher and author Glenn Aparicio Parry, who is in Taos on a Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, has been occupied with these kinds of thoughts, namely about how things came to be, what we can do to rise out of the chaos better than we were before, and to look ahead at a more aware future. Mind you, he doesn’t have all the answers, but he’s pretty good at pointing the way toward the things we might want to think about.
His first two books were the awardwinning “Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity and Nature” (North Atlantic Books, 2015), and, released earlier this year, “Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again” (Select Books). Now, he’s at work putting together a third in the series, tentatively titled “Original Love,” which he says isn’t necessarily about romantic love, but more about love for Mother Earth herself. “I think of Mother Earth as a womb that gave birth to all our creatures,” he said about his first couple of pages.
In “Original Politics,” Parry snags
President Donald Trump’s ubiquitous slogan “Make America Great Again,” and inserts the word “Sacred” as kind of a way to steal it back and make it more vital by giving citizens the responsibility to “piece together the forgotten fragments of history that keep the country divided,” according to the book’s promo material. (And, if you notice, it also changes the acronym to MASA, which means ‘corn’ in Spanish, a staple of the original Native diet.)
Parry is not Native American. He is of Basque, Aragon Spanish and Jewish descent, but much of his philosophical interest lies in how Native beliefs and experience made their ways into the founding of this nation. When he was putting together “Original Politics,” he recounts in its foreword an exchange that took place aboard a train bound for a conference. During the trip a Native man is paraphrased saying, “This country is built upon the land of my ancestors, the blood, sweat and tears of my Native brothers and sisters. It is from the living philosophy of Native America, not from books, that your founding fathers learned about liberty and justice. They saw the way we lived, took our ideas as theirs — at least the ones that served them — and gave us no credit. And then they moved us out of the way, or killed us. They thought they had killed us off, but we are still here.”
THE MAN EXPANDED on this idea, saying “The true spirit of America is in the land. It is in each breath we take, which is only the recycled breath of our ancestors.”
It was from this talk that Parry says he was committed to looking at how to make the nation sacred again. Parry’s book does a deep dive into the zeitgeist of contemporary Native ideas, shared in discussions between leaders such as Oren Lyons, Ohki Simine Forest, and Harlan McKosato all over North America on far ranging subjects including the oral tradition focus on Native rights, education, language, culture and self-governance. So, it might be easy to attribute this interest to the same kind of acquisitiveness referred to by that Native man on the train about nonNatives taking ideas that served them and not giving Natives credit. But, Parry has done his due diligence and is up front about giving full credit where it’s due, especially when it comes to righting this wrong. In fact, that’s what this book is essentially about.
“I did a good job in doing research of the book,” Parry said, “but I did not do a perfect job. And, that’s the danger of putting anything in writing, as you know. In fact, Oren [Lyons] told me … there was one place where I gave way too much credit to an academic conference that happened at Cornell University, which was the reason why the Reagan administration publicly acknowledged the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy on the Founding Fathers and really because it was Oren and other people who lobbied to get that done.”
On the history.com website, it states that in 1987, during the planning for the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution, public awareness was growing around the recognition of the Iroquois Confederacy. Donald A. Grinde Jr., a professor of transnational studies at the University of Buffalo,
and member of the Yamasee nation, is quoted in the reference saying, “Oren Lyons, who was a Faithkeeper for the Iroquois Confederacy, went to the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs and broached this subject. And then I went down to Washington and testified before the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs.”
This had an affect on the committee’s chair, Daniel Inoue of Hawaii and Congress to pass a 1988 resolution “formally acknowledging the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy on the U.S. Constitution.” In addition to this recognition, the resolution reaffirmed ‘the continuing governmentto-government relationship between Indian tribes and the United States established in the Constitution’ — an acknowledgement of the legitimacy and sovereignty of Native nations and their governments.”
Returning back to the original premise of his book, “Original Politics,” Parry says he maintains that unity in the nation is possible, based on the aforementioned vision about what we can do to rise out of the chaos better than we were before, and how we can look ahead at a more aware future.
Obviously, a lot has happened since his book was released last summer. But the ideas at its core have been knocking around in Parry’s head for a while. Back in 2016 he said he was even wondering about what might happen if the United States became a fascist nation. Yet, the momentum of thought still was driven by a sense of hope.
“After the book was published, it still is relevant,” he said. “We’re still at the point where we really have to take a good hard look at the nation and what happened during the Trump Administration. People are going to be processing this for a very long time. Donald Trump was voted out of office. I’m not one of the people who think he has any chance of doing a military coup. He’s going to be gone. But, there are over 70 million people that voted for him. So, something changed.”
The idea of unity is, he said, “a tricky question.” In the book, he titles his chapters “Unitive Consciousness,” “Dance of the Opposites,” “Maximum Diversity” and “Return to Wholeness.” He said he “tried to model that after nature: like seed, root, bud and fruit from a tree, or in Taoism, from The One comes the two, comes the many things, but along the Tao is driving the whole. There’s a oneness that is always there … Unity is a tricky thing because there’s a shadow side of unity.”
What it boils down to is that unity doesn’t always mean what we think it means. In simple terms, it can be a meeting of minds, but that meeting can be among people who share a vision of fascist America or socialism or communism or democracy. Parry even refers to what may emerge as a “unitive diversity,” or a gathering of different ideas.
So, how can we bring this country together after Trump? “It’s not going to be easy,” Parry said, “because it’s never been ‘together’ completely.”
He added that American philosopher William Irwin Thompson, who died Nov. 8, once said “we become what we hate.” That, Parry said, “really nails it for me, because when you hate something so much it becomes very corrosive. You become that other that you’re hating because you’ve lost who you are.”
That, then, gets to the heart of a possible solution. One of the reasons Trump won and gained such a devoted following is because the poor and disenfranchised folks in rural America were being ignored. Worse, they were being denigrated by Democrats and Progressives (largely urban) who assumed they were uneducated, racist and always seemed to be voting against their own self interests. But, Trump listened. He took their concerns to heart, good or bad, and in turn gained their loyalty.
Like Parry said, it’s not going to be easy. But, it can be done.
“Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again” is available through amazon.com and regional bookshops.
‘There’s a oneness that is always there … Unity is a tricky thing because there’s a shadow side of unity.’
GLENN APARICIO PARRY, PHD