It has often been said that those who ignore the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. Watergate, Vietnam, colonialism are one-word examples. Others are not so clear. The Roman Empire collapsed under an accumulation of good policies and shining civilities. Shortly before a scraggly upstart from the Russian steppes bought off the palace guard--and put the Eternal City to the torch--its emperors boasted the largest, best-trained standing army ever seen on the face of the earth.

The Roman legal code was monumental and exacting, minute and ineffectual. It remains a venerated ruin, like the gaping stones of Hadrian’s Wall. Modern-day lawyers quarry and steal from it. People expect it to work in its clauses and particles, if not in its spirit and entirety. They still have not learned Rome’s great lesson. You cannot legislate morality.

How often have you heard, "Ignorance of the law is no defense"? It is an ancient Roman legal maxim still invoked by the multipliers of laws and distributors of justice. Contact-era American Indians were as puzzled by its logic as they were baffled by the whole idea of "treaties"—secret agreements made between parts expected to be binding to the respective wholes.

Creek elders around 1750 expressed the opinion that "if our [English] laws were honest, or wisely framed, they would be plain and few, that the poor people might understand and remember them, as well as the rich." Most natives believed, and continue to believe, that the best government is small government.

The Christian Church and Papacy of the Middle Ages fell prey to a different kind of obstinance. They were so successful in preaching that everyone was probably going to hell that most people believed them and acted accordingly. What was one more sin? The result was a society that appeared to be divided between the atrocious and the hypocritical.

If those who are ignorant of their mistakes are the worst offenders, the corollary is equally valid. Those who best understand history are the ones most committed to changing it. Now who has a deeper sense of the past than the Indian? His history does not begin in 1066 or 1492 or the birth of Christ.  It extends as far back as the beginning of human memory. The first lessons taught to children are the tribe’s creation stories.

The Maya have the oldest calendar in the world. Many native people even remember other worlds and teach that this is the fifth. The white man invented the work week; he is good at splitting seconds. But the red man has the wisdom of the ages.

Nor do Indians focus more on recent events, giving the immediate past more weight than it deserves. In fact, many dismiss the whole last five hundred years by saying, "The white man is only the most recent arrival and his day may well be the shortest."

The clan system represents the oldest form of social organization on the planet. When you say, "I am Bird Clan," it means your mother was so. . .and her mother. . .and her mother, back to the beginning of time. Native people also understand the meaning of "gene memory."

When they approach genealogy their crucial concerns are not wills and marriages and property ownership but distant and sometimes "mythically" remote grandfathers and grandmothers. The history of the red man is not the tale of the great deeds of famous men but the survival of a people. Clan elders plan for the seventh generation.

Anyone endowed with a historical perspective becomes supremely adaptive. Only very rarely does study of the past lead you to live in the past. You learn not only to accept change but to welcome it, work with it. The consequence of knowledge is power.

Many ancestors of the American Indians of today overcame colossal challenges when the white man arrived, with his ships and guns and smallpox and whisky. The Indian trader James Adair describes how the Cherokee and Creek went from what he called "savagery" to decadence in the space of a single generation. They continued to adapt. Did they abandon their old ways entirely?

Why did our great-grandparents suppress the clan system and deny their Indian culture? Did they cease to be committed to the future? Did they rush into oblivion and die in bitterness? I suggest it was a survival technique.

My ancestors on Raccoon Mountain in what became Alabama told their children when they were still babes in arms, "It is finished. You must go with the white man." The second generation hid in the caves and hills and observed the white man. Some married white or half-breed and began to pass in the new society.

When an Indian warrior was surprised by the enemy and clearly overwhelmed, he would often "inswamp" to escape. He threw away his weapons, stripped entirely naked and dove into the swamplands. Warriors sometimes returned from hundreds of miles away by this method,. It was usually considered improper by the enemy to pursue them unless they tried to salvage their arms or clothing. The fact that many an inswamped Indian returned for revenge with renewed vigor gave no pause to the enemy. Those were the rules of war, and war was sacred.

Our ancestors chose the strategy of inswamping on a grand scale. They were thinking about their clans as they denied their clans and Indian identity. They were thinking about us, their descendants. The proof of their wisdom lies in the long view. We survived and we are no less Indian than ever before.