The Iroquois Gens

[Carlos Boyle]

You may have read Frederick Engels’ book Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State written in 1884. I’ll be glad if you pay attention to chapter three based on the Lewis H. Morgan’s investigations about the Iroquois Indians of the Grate lakes of North America, specially this chapter "The Iroquois Gens".
If we are looking for a P2P society and organization model, what Morgan describes about the Iroquies is a close approach to it. If we consider that the Iroquies League last for more than four hundred years we have to consider seriously this model to even think about P2P forms of aggregation.
Engels says:
“All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other's freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organized.... It serves to explain that sense of independence and personal dignity universally an attribute of Indian character “
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