Interesting claims about democracy among American natives preceding the Democracy in America by the Founding Fathers and Mothers.
However, is this also again glorification of the Noble Savage or romanticizing of indigenous people? Summed up in one term: wishful thinking or embellishment.
One issue is e.g. the lack of contact with other, external powers by the Native Americans as far as we know. E.g. they did not have to worry to much about invasions until the Europeans (other than Spaniards/Portuguese) came. Nature's abundance may have also helped to reduce warfare and strife.
The article also mentions the Little Ice Age (which only ended around 1850 CE) as one of the reasons why some large civilizations declined.
"When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they were learning from history that democracy was likely to fail – to find someone who would fool the people into giving him complete power and then end the democracy.
They designed checks and balances to guard against the accumulation of power they had found when studying ancient Greece and Rome. But there were others in North America who had also seen the dangers of certain types of government and had designed their own checks and balances to guard against tyranny: the Native Americans.
Although most Americans today don’t know it, there were large centralized civilizations across much of North America in the 10th through 12th centuries. They built massive cities and grand irrigation projects across the continent. Twelfth-century Cahokia, on the banks of the Mississippi River, had a central city about the size of London at the time. The sprawling 12th-century civilization of the Huhugam had several cities of more than 10,000 people and a total population of perhaps 50,000 in the Southwestern desert. ...
In the 13th century, though, a global cooling trend began, which has been called the Little Ice Age. In part because of that cooling, large-scale farming became more difficult, and these large civilizations struggled to feed their people. Elites began hoarding wealth. The people wanted change. ...
As they formed these new and more dispersed societies, the people who had overthrown or fled the great cities and their too powerful leaders sought to avoid mesmerizing leaders who made tempting promises in difficult times. So they designed complex political structures to discourage centralization, hierarchy and inequality and encourage shared decision-making.
These societies intentionally created balanced power structures. For example, the oral history [???] of the Osage Nation records that it once had one great chief who was a military leader, but its council of elder spiritual leaders, known as the “Little Old Men,” decided to balance that chief’s authority with that of another hereditary chief, who would be responsible for keeping peace.
Another way some societies balanced power was through family-based clans. Clans communicated and cooperated across multiple towns. They could work together to balance the power of town-based chiefs and councils.
An ideal of leadership
Many of these societies required convening all of the people – men, women and children – for major political, military, diplomatic and land-use decisions. Hundreds or even thousands might show up, depending on how momentous the decision was.
They strove for consensus, though they didn’t always achieve it. In some societies, it was customary for the losing side to quietly leave the meeting if they couldn’t bring themselves to agree with the others. ..."
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