After a brief introduction to the history of Indigenous North American writers' engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity, in this lecture I focus on two themes in particular: the Roman Empire and Greek democracy. I review Native writers' comparisons of the United States to the Roman Empire as both source of citizenship and paradigm of collapse, as well as Iroquois uses of the eighteenth-century European ethnographic trope according to which the Iroquois are "the Romans of the New World." Second, I consider how 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.
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https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/Lb-UFNCGSKmc5ko7in_l-w#/reg…