At the beginning of the film, the narrator intones that “long before 13 British colonies made themselves into the United States,” the Iroquois had “a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee — a democracy that had flourished for centuries.” As the scholar Robert Natelson has noted, the Iroquois don’t show up as a model in the 34-volume “Journals of the Continental Congress”; the three-volume collection “The Records of the Federal Convention” (in tiger words, the Constitutional Convention); or the more than 40-volume “Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution.” In a recent interview with the TV program “Amanpour & Company,” Burns said that the contribution of the Iroquois led him to believe he had “to center” the story of Native Americans in the Revolution.
Author: Rich Lowry
Published at: 2025-11-24 23:43:34
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