Here is several snips from a review of Original Wisdom by Thom Hartmann:
“After I grew to know the Sng’oi, the People, and when I knew they accepted me, I apologized for having spoken of them as slaves before I knew what they called themselves. …(snip)
“This time, again, one person answered. He – a rather adventuresome young man, I was told later – spoke slowly, simply, for my benefit perhaps. “No,” he said, “we do not mind when others call us Sakai. We look at the people down below – they have to get up at a certain time in the morning, they have to pay for everything with money, which they have to earn doing things for other people. They are constantly told what they can and cannot do.’ He paused, and then added, ‘No, we do not mind when they call us slaves.”…(snip)
“Similarly, many of the Europeans wanted to become “savages” and live among the Indians:”
“Over the next hundred years, as more and more Whites encountered Native Americans, the incidence of Whites joining Indian tribes dramatically increased. Derisively termed “White Indians” by the colonists, thousands of European immigrants to the Americas simply walked away from the emerging American society to join various Indian tribes. Ethnohistorian James Axtell wrote that these early settlers joined the Indians because “they found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity�” Axtell quoted two White Indians who wrote to the people they�d left behind that they�d found, “the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.”
In 1747, Reverend Cadwallader Colden wrote of the growing exodus of Whites for Indian life: “No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends and relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian Friends and Acquaintance; several of them that were by the Caressings of their Relations persuaded to come Home, in a little Time grew tired of our Manner of living, and ran away again to the Indians, and ended their Days with them.”
While most people in the modern world think of contemporary tribal people as hungry to join our civilized world, wolff found the Sng�oi just as happy with their own democratic culture as Colden found Native Americans in the 1700s.
Similarly, Colden wrote: “�Indian Children have been carefully educated among the English, cloathed and taught, yet, I think, there is not one Instance, that any of these, after they had Liberty to go among their own People, and were come to Age, would remain with the English, but returned to their own Nations, and became as fond of the Indian Manner as those that knew nothing of a civilized Manner of living.”
Not being fettered to eight or more hours of work a day to enrich some person or corporation at the top of an economic food chain, people in democratic indigenous cultures spend much of their time interacting with their children. James Bricknell, who was captured by the Delaware in the early 1800s and lived among them for several years before returning to his family, wrote in 1842: “The Delawares are the best people to train up children I ever was with� Their leisure hours are, in a great measure, spent in training up their children to observe what they believe to be right� They certainly follow what they are taught to believe right more closely, and I might say more honestly, in general, than we Christians� I know I am influenced to good, even at this day, more from what I learned among them, than what I learned among people of my own color.”
