Editor:
I was concerned to read Ms. Pfister's notions (Coast Reporter letters, Aug. 31) that First Nations people have been given what she called a "free ride into modern time founded on centuries of accumulated knowledge" and "a chance to participate in the building of a democratic society."
The roots of the democratic society we enjoy today are in the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations - the Mohawks, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayugas, Senecas and Tuscaroras. (While we were taught democracy originated in ancient Athens, that governance system resembles ours like a beetle resembles a butterfly.)
Iroquois ambassadors mentored European arrivals in a centuries-old democratic system that included separation of governmental powers into three branches (executive, judicial and legislative - sound familiar?), freedom of speech and rights for women.
Europeans settling in what is now the U.S. and Canada modelled their governments on this time-tested First Nations democracy. In 1988 the U.S. Senate resolved with a 100 per cent majority to at last officially acknowledge "the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations to the development of the United States;" that the U.S. "was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy" and the Iroquois were the source of "many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself" (H. Con. Res. 331).
European settlers were taught many other things by the First Nations.
More than 60 per cent of our current food supply comes from First Nations technology. Even our practice of regular bathing we owe to the First Nations people. The case can be made that today we govern, feed and care for ourselves in ways that are more similar to the average First Nations person at the time of Columbus than to the average European person at the time of Columbus.
One wonders who could express gratitude to whom for that "free ride into modern time founded on centuries of accumulated knowledge."
Kim M. Wilkinson
Gibsons
