"The native people of North America are often perceived through the story of the brave colonists fighting with the belligerent and barbaric Indians. All of us like to watch movies about the Wild West, some people dream of visiting Tombstone, but few people are really concerned about who the Indians really were, or whether they had a social or political structure. In fact most of the Indian tribes at the beginning of the Encounter era shifted from egalitarian societies of mobile, hunter-gatherer people to hierarchical sedentary or semi-sedentary chiefdoms. Some tribes developed complex social systems based on a corporation of several tribes or groups. The best example is the League of Five Nations. This religious and political organization of five Iroquois-speaking tribes organized itself as a semi-state organization. Today’s American legal doctrine assumes that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America took the structure of the League as a foundation for the American state regime."(...)