I love learning about the Enlightendigenous origins of liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy in America
I've written before about my functional new word Enlightendigenous. In that post I shared what I learned about the evidence for the philosophy and practice of indigenous people in North America influencing and inspiring Europeans into what became called the Enlightenment. Europe at the time had little to no democracy or social mobility. Your status at birth---that is, the status of your parents---determined your place and role for life with rare exception. People lived under a dominance hierarchy based on access to resources like arable land enforced by a system of justice and military. Meanwhile, on the east coast of North America, there were no river valleys like Mesopotamia or the Nile to precipitate dominance hierarchy on that scale so people practiced local politics. They…
