Democracy, Citizenship, and Empire: Native American Writers on Greece, Rome, and the United States (2025 John B. and Mary K. McDiarmid Lecture)

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.