ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the following four sites for egalitarian democratic practice in Indigenous communities: Aymara, Karen, Haudenosaunee and Zapatistas. It presents these four groups because they are relatively well known and because their egalitarian practices have been comparatively well documented. The chapter also questions several foundational assumptions that many make about the terms under which democracy with a difference might be understood. The Haudenosaunee or Longhouse Confederacy, sometimes known as the Iroquois Confederacy, is a multinational confederacy that was in existence long before contact with the Europeans. Traditional notions of political difference for the Zapatistas are a constant presence, as the residents for the autonomous communities live side by side in small villages and rural settings with non-Zapatista movement residents. The Iroquois mechanism of giving representative positions to men but giving women other modes of access to power through the selection and removal of representatives is patently unequal in the modern, individualist model of equality.
