4 — Wednesday, February 8; 1989 — North Shore News

Bos HUNTER

© strictly personal ©

IT’S FASCINATING to watch the reaction of European
immigrants — my honor-encrusted colleague Doug Collins
among them — to the influx of new immigrants from Asia.

I’m quite sure that future gener-
ations of entrenched Canadian cit-
izens of Asian background, or
whatever, will view the arrival of
new immigrants from Mars, or
wherever, with the same unhap-
piness.

The uptighteciness of the newly-
landed Brits, or Dutchmen or
Germans or Italians, or whomever,
is understandable. But it is also
fairly amusing, if you can take a
step back for a moment, and con-
sider it from the point of view of
the native people.

Well-heeled foreigners arriving
and ‘ttaking over’’ is the story of
North America for the last 500
years, n’est-ce-pas?

Why should things change now?
Isn’t our mythology of a New
World built entirely on the
presumption of the splendidness of
brave new immigrants bringing
their skilis and wealth to a
wasteland that could be made into
something?

WV lane

LANEWAY SPEEDERS take
note. The icgal speed limit in West
Vancouver District lanes is being
reduced from 25 km/hr to 20
km/hr.

West Vancouver District Council
recently agreed to amend the traf-
fic bylaw and ceduce the legal
speed limit in lancs.

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As for property values being
driven up, that’s the fundamental
name of the game, isn’t it? Prop-
erty values always go up. If they
don’t, there’s something wrong. So
what's ail the snivelling about?

In these dark days of ‘‘inva-
sion"’ from Hong Kong, it is
perhaps worth thinking about what
this continent was like before
anybody arrived from any other
continent at all.

Native people don’t buy the
argument, by the way, that their
forefathers crossed a land bridge
from Siberia.

“If you look at the footprints,”
an Indian elder once told me,
“you'll see they were going the
other way."*

In any event, fairly recent schol-
arship points to an astounding
“‘discovery’’ about the native peo-
ple of North America.

It turns out that rather than be-
ing savages who had to be tamed
by the enlightened white man, they

were, in fact, in possessicn of a far
more politically-evolved civiliza-
tion than the poor European
schmucks who landed on their
shores.

The authors found that the
League of the Iroquois, also
known as the Iroquois or Mohawk
Confederacy, was at the time of
the arrival of the white man, an
ancient federal republic with pro-
vision for initiative, referendum
and recall, sufferage for women as
well as men, political liberty,
freedom of religious beliefs, pro-
hibition of slavery, a volunteer
militia, a directive to allow the
pursuit of happiness, the idea of
leaders as servants, a minimum of
government interference, and with
a two-house congress to boot.

When Jacques Cartier landed on
what is now Canadian soil, the
I -eaguc of the Troquois was under

“T he notion of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’
was an Iroquois idea, incorporated into the French
and American revolutions and the revolt of the

Spanish colonies.’

And, get this, the basic ideas 5 of

democracy and communism alike,
were lifted from the Indians and
transplanted back on to European
-~ and, eventually, Asian — soil!

For the student of these matters,
I recommend Felix S. Cohen’s The
Legal Conscience, published by
Yaie University Press, and more
recently, Bruce E. Johansen’s
Forgotten Founders, published by
the Harvard Common Press.

Both books involve a re-ex-
amination of American revolu-
tionary writings, particularly the
works of Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson.

speeds reduced

This action was taken after
repetitive complaints were received
about dangerous speeding in ihe
1700 block lane between Marine
Drive and Duchess Avenue.

Experimental speed ramps were
also constructed in the 1700 block
lane, a technique currently being
used in the City of Vancouver.

Duchess Ave. resident Edward
Guy, who has represented the
neighborhood’s concerns about the
speeding in the lane, commented:
“TL wonder if the reduced speed
limit will be honored any more
than the existing speed limit.”

See Speed
Pago &

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the rule of its 33rd presiding chief,

making it about two-thirds as old
as the United States is at the mo-
ment, if you count its age in terms
of the number of presidents.

I find it intriguing in the extreme
to contemplate the idea that the
Iroquois had a better democratic
tradition back then than we have
now.

And certainly, in Canada at
least, it can be argued that without
referendum and recall, and with a
corrupt Senate that is merely a

EUROPEAN FACIAL

backroom payola scam, we have a
far inferior democracy to what the
Iroquois had.

As for the minimum of govern-
ment interference, I hardly need
utter a discreet cough.

At the time the Europeans land-
ed on North American shores,
Europe itself was in the grip of
tyranny and despotism, and had
been for well over a millenium,
since the defeat of the Greeks. No-
tions of freedom were virtually
non-existant,

Yet within a couple of centuries,
the burning ideal of democracy,
along the lines set out by the In-
dians, found its way into the
thoughts of Francisco Vitoria,
Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Mon-
taigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire and
Rousseau, to name a few.

The notion of ‘‘liberty, equality
and fraternity’? was an Iroquois
idea, incorporated into the French
and American revolutions and the
revolt of the Spanish colonies.

To carry things even further, by
the time we get to the 19th century,
characters like Marx and Engels
were interpreting other aspects of
Iroquois social organization into
their own theories of communism,
coming to a different but equally
derivative conclusion.

So we have a world divided, by
the end of the 20th century, into
two great political blocs, both of
them based on the original political
teachings of native North
Americans! @

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