Liam Kharem

Michael Grove

FIQWS Composition

11/25/19

The Iroquois Confederacy and Incan Empire: An example of why Indigenous history can be learned from

Western society has and has had a tendency to see other cultures through a very subjective lens when analyzing their traditions, structure, and level of advancement. While there isn’t one physical embodiment of western culture tradition, especially in the United States today, the white European societies often labeled as such controlled most of the world in the birth of this new age. Socially, the western countries of today, while different from their forefathers, still have an air of supremacy about them. During the colonial period, the biased lens that European conquerors had when looking at the rest of the world affected the way Indigenous people in the Americas would be remembered for generations. Often highly advanced and specialized societies are not given the amount of admiration they deserve, because they valued different ideas than the Europeans. Specifically, the Iroquois Confederacy and the Incan Empire are examples of highly advanced indigenous societies that have been overlooked due to the relativism of the western eye and the western supremacy doctrine that has been passed down since the colonial period, and we could benefit from studying aspects of their respective cultures.

The point of my perspective isn’t to diminish the complexities and beauties of western culture and the nations that have been influenced by its ideology. However, one must look at the effect that hundreds of years of imperialism have on a global scale, and how a dominant culture can easily extinguish any flame from others. In Of Cannibals and Of Customs, Michel Montaigne argues that to an outsider looking in, the ideas of other groups of people will always be considered “barbarous.”(Handler) During the beginning of the colonization of the new world, religion and cultural indoctrination were used hand in hand with genocide in order to completely wipe these “outside” cultures from the planet. Montaigne also writes about the concept that a group will try to justify a relative concept as an absolute, because of cultural conditioning that confuses custom with fact. (Handler) One of the more obvious examples of this happening during the colonial period is through religion. Before even arriving in the new world, the European brain had been trained to reject any non biblical explanation for faith. Immediately, the European invaders saw a populace of idoltors and satanists, which gave an excuse for delegitimizing their different customs. In general, Europeans often deal in binaries, and many of the first explorers had an intense fear of the unknown, that drove their curiosity onward. Cultural customs are an extremely powerful tool, and make it difficult if not impossible to discern your own biases. Europe, coming out of the dark age, wasn’t the best place to live, in fact it was probably one of the worst times and places to be alive. Slavery was rampant, a shocking number of children didn’t make it to age 10, and the common person lived a barely sustainable life. It was a violent existence, with everything from the almost daily burning of witches to a particularly gruesome story of a man in Milan who was torn apart and eaten by “an enraged mob.” (Stannard 61) 

Compare this to the Iroquois Confederacy, who had established a “Great Law of Peace” that tied all Iroquois speaking people into a conglomerate in Northeastern America. Gender equality was a basis for the political process they took part in. Clan Mothers controlled their small clans or communities, who all lived in a longhouse together. The Clan Mother then elected men to rule as chiefs with specific duties. The political structures were complex yet logical. Clans made up a Moiety, Moties made up a nation, and the five(later six) nations made up the Iroquois.(History Civilis) The officials elected to debate new ideas and laws would meet and a unanimous vote was needed by every elected official before a decision was final. When you really think about that idea, it is mind blowing. This rule could lead to days and days of discussion and debate, and it probably made the political process very slow, but it also made it very deliberate and methodical. With this system, the Iroquois were able to govern an extensive territory and function at a macro and micro level, allowing the nations and even clans to control their day to day while the larger Confederacy functioned over that. 

The observant reader would notice right away that this system seems to be pretty

close to the federalist democracy that we live in today. There’s absolutely no denying the deep impact that the Iroquois had on the founding fathers, and CK Ballatore writes, “In the absence of a European democratic model, the Founding Fathers turned to the seemingly perfect state of the Iroquois Five Nations as a template for a federal United States, combining the best of both worlds.”(Ballatore) That statement perfectly sums up the deeper point behind this paper- that cross cultural studies and acceptance of educational substance in other places outside of your own boundaries can lead to a perfect storm of sorts. The founding fathers took a roadmap from “the only living breathing democracy the founders had witnessed when the time came to declare independence…” (Ballatore) The federalist experiment at work in the Iroquois would prove to be the best way to have egalitarian rule over a large geographic area, while still meeting the needs of each individual group, and for that we owe them a lifetime of gratitude, especially when we take into account all of the other places in the world that have a far more oppressive government.  

Even predating the establishment of the United States, men of the Five Nations advised the British Colonists on important matters, and helped keep them afloat in the foreign and often times harsh environment. The air of respect and trust for the Iroquois ideas continued throughout the movement for independence. All of the founding fathers spent extended periods of time with the Iroquois, fully immersing themselves in their tradition. (Ballatore) The additional, less concrete influence over some of the cultural design of the United States was the consideration of the happiness of the people residing within the nation. For both the Iroquois and the United States, this manifests in local government leaders taking into account the opinions of the people who elected them. The idea of happiness being an important structural part of a government and society was foreign to Europeans. Benjamin Franklin said, Happiness is more generally and equally diffused among Savages than in civilized societies. No European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”(Ballatore) While the cultural relativism of Europeans during the time is still present in Franklin’s word choice, calling them savage, this statement proves that the only real consideration for a group being considered “savage” was that they were not a part of the European tradition.

The other great society that contradicts western superiority would be the Inca Empire. While the Iroquois had a large swath of land under their jurisdiction, it was tiny compared to the stretch of territory under Incan control. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that a group doesn’t acquire such vast amounts of land without conquest and violence, and Inca had their fair share of it, subjugating many of the people on the west coast of South America. The tendency for most civilizations that are rapidly growing is to continue expanding. However, a first hand account from Juan de Betanzos, a historian who documented The Narrative History of the Inca spoke about an encounter with Inca Yuoanque and his Caciques, where he begins to delegate land to all of them for them to care for and create store houses for food and resources. He believed that war and expansion were not sustainable and that they must create a system to thrive for years to come. The consideration for the future had by the Inca is clearly seen in their infrastructure. w Once the Empire was established they achieved feats of engineering, architecture, and governance that establishes them as one of the most interesting societies in the Americas. Many of the technologies rivaled that of Europe during the time, as well as the great classical Empires like Rome and Greece. They respected their environment, and lived symbiotically with it. For example, in the advanced city planning they adhered to in their mountainous cities, they had cruciform streets and roofs designed to prevent flooding from the mountain rains. They had “clear-water rivers and streams” that flowed from the mountains into the capitol, providing both a way to bathe as well as to keep the streets clean and wash away and debris. (Stannard 42) With hygiene being almost completely neglected by the Europeans, to see it as such a key part of the infrastructure for the Incan people was most likely shocking, and can explain partially why the Indigenous people were so unprepared for the various diseases brought to them by the Europeans.  The Inca palaces were made of marble, rare woods, and precious metals, with ballrooms large enough to hold 4000 people. They constructed highways that fit perfectly into their environment, allowing flora and fauna to grow naturally with it. To cross over places of high elevation, they somehow discovered the technology to create suspension bridges that they trusted to hold supplies and people being transported. Many Inca structures even today remain standing as a baseline for structures. (Stannard 42-46) All of this is to say that the Inca not only were able to govern a civilization stretching the entire west coast of South America, with a population of just a single city reaching hundreds of thousands, but they were stable enough to innovate and create new technologies that were sustainable and massive in scale. Modern humans could learn a great many things from the way they impacted their environment. Of course, we have a population that is exponentially bigger than that of the Incan Empire, but the general ideas behind their infrastructure could come in handy. 

Of course, almost everyone sees the things around them through a biased lens, with relative ideas about what exists as a truth. As Montaigne argued, customs and cultural traditions have a large impact on how a group of people interprets another group. Being that two halves of the world were completely separated from each other for tens of thousands of years, when they interacted for the first time they had wildly different ways of life. The Europeansm having dominant military technology, claimed total cultural superiority over the thousands of distinct cultures that existed in the Americas, and therefore diminished the many important traditions on this “new” continent. From advanced socialist and democratic societies, large scale infrastructure and welfare programs, luxuries and opulence that made the europeans thirst for riches tremble, to certain societies that actively thought about all of its inhabitants and tried their best to accommodate everyone, these societies deserve their rightful attention. We’d be doing ourselves a disservice if, because they were subjugated by the Europeans, we saw them as somehow less advanced than the Europeans. The goal of this piece, if anything, is to urge you the reader to be aware of the cultural relativism that is innate in all societies, and think past it, trying to paint an unbiased portrait of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Works Cited

“Betanzos, Juan de.” Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library, edited by Sonia G. Benson, et al., vol. 3: Biographies and Primary Sources,

C.K. Ballatore. “America’s First Nation.” History Today, 1 April 2017, 51-53. 

David E Stannard. The Conquest of the New World: American Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 1992. pp. 42-46

“The Iroquois Confederacy.” YouTube, uploaded by History Civilis, 20 June 2018Richard Handler. “Of Cannibals and Custom: Montaigne’s Cultural Relativism.”  Anthropology Today, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Oct,. 1986). pp. 12-14