American Indian Culture and Research Journal

It would seem that there is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle of early colonial American History that has been omitted from the puzzle because it is American Indian. This paper deals with a combination of the influence of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace on American government and consideration of its possible influence on Russian government. From the standpoint of historiography we are uncertain whether what follows is revisionist, revision of the revision, or a subsequent one. But it is usually acknowledged that the first major modern democracy was accomplished in North America with the American Revolution and the events leading to the Constitution of 1787. This historical assumption is rarely disputed, but the date of an accomplished democracy might be. There is, for example, persuasive evidence that North American democracy began between 300 to 500 years earlier with the Iroquois Law of the Great Peace and that this form of representative democracy influenced the formation of the colonial struggle to inaugurate the first modern constitutional democracy in the world-that of the United States Constitution of 1787. There have been other well-known democracies, such as the Greek city-state, but these ancient forms were direct democracies needing the whole body of eligible citizens to participate.