Parishti Project

Possibly the longest running fraud is that democracy has a European origin.

Canada's unique role in this project has been the Two Founding Nations[1] origin story, which fails to recognize:

• the lands, labours, agri-science, and other Indigenous midwifery in the birthing of Canada; and
• the resources and labour appropriated from the colonies, protectorates, and mandates of both Britain and France, that were consumed in the forging of Canada.

Though Canada was an international effort from the start, the greatest injustice is the failure to recognize that democracy is of Indigenous origin.

Oral traditions put the formation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, a consensus-based participatory democracy, at approximately 900 CE[2].

European-descended scholars, who are understandably reluctant to acknowledge that Indigenous democracies pre-date first contact with Europeans, prefer to credit Europeans with bringing democracy to North America from Europe, where it did not exist at the time of first contact. The first (limited) western attempt at universal suffrage was in the Declaration of Independence[3] after the American Revolution in 1776 (almost 300 years after first contact in 1492)[4]. It next appeared in the Jacobin Constitution[5] of France in 1793. (The Jacobins copied America's homework.).

By the time of Canada's Confederation in 1867, the idea of limited representative democracy was firmly rooted in European contexts, and Canada could pretend to have learned democracy from Europe, instead of its original source, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The European conceit is to backdate credit for the ideation of democracy to Ancient Greece, relying on cultural continuity to argue that Europe is the natural heir to Greek political traditions. While it is true that Aristotle coined the word democracy, he also denounced it as a dangerous state of lawlessness defined by mob rule (the literal meaning of democracy). Any attempt by Greek city states to establish democratic governance were brutally put down by the monarchies that surrounded them.

Democracy was not practised anywhere in Europe prior to European first contact with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. In fact, European monarchs had to be beheaded for democracy to take root in foreign soil.

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[1] Two Founding Nations is the national equivalent of the “self-made man” myth.

[2] Jordan Baker, “Origins of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy”, online: World History Encyclopedia <https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1656/origins-of-the-haudenosaunee-iroquois-confederacy/>.\

[3] “American Revolution” in Wikipedia (2024) Page Version ID: 1245062028.

[4] “European colonization of the Americas” in Wikipedia (2024) Page Version ID: 1245890009.

[5] “French Constitution of 1793” in Wikipedia (2024) Page Version ID: 1201329007.