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Comment by NoGravitas | Hacker News Reader

> some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe

Do you mean the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee [1]? I.e., the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy? The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers? The form of government of one of the major regional powers at the time the US was formed? Don't know why your daughter's teachers would bother teaching her about that. Sure, it's awful if they were neglecting all those other things, but seriously, anyone learning American colonial-era history needs to learn about the Iroquois Confederacy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Law_of_Peace

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> The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers?

This reads a bit more like spinning a noble savages tale rather than the much more obvious explanation being that the founders were building on the proven greco-roman models and various Enlightmentment figures - as they directly state in a number of federalist papers.

I don't think the "noble savage" idea applies in this case. The problem of the noble savage idea is that it portrays indigenous people as simple, pure, and uncorrupted, while overlooking that indigenous people are complex just like non-indigenous people.

It's no myth that the Haudenosaunee and other indigenous people had sophisticated governments that could have inspired the writers of the US Constitution. The Haudenosaunee's democracy-ish form of government extends back probably a thousand years. The people who wrote the US Constitution had contact with these people. The exact extent to which this shaped the Constitution is up for debate, of course.

Yes, the US government draws from European roots too. I hope my kids learn about both the Magna Carta and the Great Law of Peace.

> The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers?

That would be a synergy of ideas primarily found in Polybius, Montesquieu, and the extant British constitution.

Not to discount the value of teaching about the political system of the Iroquois -- that's an interesting a valid topic to cover in school -- but it's not appropriate to attempt to link it to the US Constitution in a way that's wholly speculative and tenuous, and do so at the expense of properly teaching about the actual ideas that factored into the development of the constitution.

It was from the extensive intellectual discourse on separation of powers during the English civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers

The single greatest influence on American society is what was going on in Britain in the mid 17th century and Americans learn absolutely nothing about it in school. It’s like writing a history or MacOS X that doesn’t mention NeXT.

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