Councils and Democratic Institutions in the Eastern Woodlands

As we are both children of the 70s and 80s, the things that we were taught about the history of democracy in public school somehow does not track with what we understand about the topic today. In fact, even college courses seemed to have been slightly off, at best. The key to our, and likely others’ misunderstandings of democracy, is that the concept is often presented and discussed in everyday parlance, either as a state of being or as something that one can possess or be (i.e., “in this country we have democracy” or “we’re a democracy”). Indeed, it is also often framed in opposition to some “other” non-democracy. The reality of this is that even in a country that often colloquially touts itself as the “greatest democracy in the world” there is a long history of marginalized voices and even greater violence against groups of people, some of which continues to this very day.

The commonly held belief that “real” democracy came only to North America in 1776 is tied into the state-of-being view that promotes American democracy. Some service is paid to Indigenous governance that existed among the Northeastern First Nations people as part of the inspiration for modern American democracy. Less well known by the broader public as another example of Native American governance is the adoption of a constitutional government in the early 1800s by Cherokee groups and their establishment of the capital of New Echota in northern Georgia. This latter example is presented as a government modeled on the United States. In both cases, much popular discourse, and even some academic writing, around each of these examples portrays them as recent formulations, not “real” democracy for a variety of reasons (e.g., the scale and structure) or at worst, mimicry.

In our new paper in American Antiquity, we ask the question what if “democratic institutions,” that is rules and processes that promote deliberation, debate, and consensus among diverse groups of people towards common governance, had longer histories than we currently imagine in the Eastern Woodlands. Part of the challenge is that since the 1970s, archaeologists have worked with a model of hereditary chiefly elites, which were believed to have sway over the greater populace. Sixteenth-century Spanish accounts placed such individuals at the center many of their narratives, which along with ethnographic observations from other parts of the world, solidified the view, albeit with some detractors, that chiefs and chiefdoms dominated the region. What’s more is the post-sixteenth century documentation of Native governance in the same region, which has a distinctly more democratic flavor to it with its emphasis on councils, is disregarded as being the result of the “collapse,” both in a political and demographic sense of these somehow more superior, more “complex” polities.

Our research at the Cold Springs site in Georgia documents the existence of councils some 1500 years ago. We use this knowledge to rethink the political systems of Ancestral Muskogean people up through the centuries through both the archaeological and documentary evidence. Our purpose is to illustrate that the democratic institution of “the council” was present for far longer and likely was far more prevalent than our current models allow. Our paper is not about identifying the first democracy; indeed, we believe that similar kinds of council-based institutions existed across the Eastern Woodlands. The very persistence of this kind of institution indicates that it was a key part of governance, not simply a fall back or reversion during the period of colonization. We argue that councils, as institutions, were the crucial key to the harmony of political life across not only villages and towns but throughout the region. In this way, we think that research into the history of democratic institutions offers a point of departure to consider the roles and trajectories of our own key institutions. As democracy is something that is not achieved or possessed, but rather something to be worked at daily and facilitated by institutions. If those institutions come under threat, then it becomes harder for everyone’s voice to be heard and more dangerous for those who are silenced.

Images courtesy: Dr. Amanda Roberts Thompson.

The article The Early Materialization of Democratic Institutions among the Ancestral Muskogean of the American Southeast is out now open access in American Antiquity.

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