ABSTRACT
In 1952, scholar and activist Felix Cohen asserted that Native Americans had contributed importantly to the majority culture of the United States and, through that nation’s colonizing efforts, the world. Within the ensuing decades, an increasing number of scholars have come to support Cohen’s interpretation, and to expand upon it, crediting Native Americans with an important intellectual claim on modern social development. A case has been made for how Native consensual democracy helped shape the thoughts of some of the United States’ founders, most prominently Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Decades later, the founding mothers of American feminism learned from native matrilineal cultures. Today, Indigenous acceptance of gender fluidity is reflected in mainstream American culture as well. Environmental points of view also have entered mainstream thought, but only after the perils of advanced industrial pollution and climate change have become manifest. This chapter re-perspectivizes sources and scholarship on early-modern nation-founding projects to demonstrate the presence of Indigenous thought and worldviews in that period as well as its influence today, staking an Indigenous claim on those institutions.
