Democracy, Citizenship, and Empire: Iroquois Writers and Greco-Roman Antiquity

After a brief introduction to the history of Indigenous North American writers' engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity, I focus on three themes: democracy, citizenship, and empire. First, I consider how Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) writers from the nineteenth century to today have suggested that their own people's ancient and still-living governance systems more fully embody the concept of "democracy" than those of ancient Athens or the United States. Then I introduce some of the ways in which Iroquois writers have engaged with ancient Rome, whether in reflections on various concepts of citizenship, or in response to a European historiographical trope of the Iroquois as "Romans of the New World," or as a warning paradigm of the ephemerality and collapse of empires.

Reception to follow.