The Diggers and The Levelers?

So, the pod for an AH idea I'm working on for a timeline about a colonization of America that results in a better situation for the natives involves the Levellers and Diggers (two groups that evolved in the English civil war who were radically egalitarian, in favor of common ownership of land, and other common traits of groups from the radical reformation, although the Levellers had a more secular political orientation rather than the actual radical Protestant diggers) traveling or being exiled to America in the wake of the civil war and serving as the basis for a syncretic cultural mixing between English settlers and the natives in America. (The starting point here was a brief flight of fancy of the diggers joining the Iroquois confederacy as a seventh tribe).


So I'm wondering if people have any good resources and ideas and practices of these groups beyond the stuff on Wikipedia. I have decent resources at hand for information on Native American groups from anthropology archives online, so mostly looking for the initial English side here.
 
I should first introduce myself as the author of Donnacona's Dream, which is a TL which wanks by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians (who were the northern 'cousins' of the Iroquois who lived in the St. Lawrence Valley, but were exterminated OTL some time between 1540 and 1600). I have also used the idea of European migrants becoming adopted into the nation, and helping to spread new ideas, although in Donnacona's Dream it's really not European migrants but their Métis descendants who have the most impact.

One thing I would say is that wikipedia is particularly unreliable when researching pre-colonial and early colonial Native culture. The issue is that there aren't a lot of written records available from Northeastern North America from the 1500s and 1600s, and that those records that are available are often written by highly biased sources such as missionaries. What that means is that there is no historical consensus about the time period, and so there are wildly contradictory competing stories about what happened. Some are based on the scattered written primary sources, others on archeological data, others on oral history.

What I would recommend is to go to your local library (ok, maybe the central library of the largest nearby city would be a better bet), and search the catalogue for "iroquois". Then, check out the three or four most recently published books and read all of them. It really helped me to get multiple different pictures of what was going on so I could form my own opinion of what story to believe.

Of all the books checked out of the library, my favourite was Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas by Barbara Alice Mann. I think I found it the most helpful partly because it told a story that none of the other books did (and Wikipedia doesn't, for the most part), because almost all of the other books were written by men and based upon male sources. The nature of iroquoian society was that it was divided into a 'male sphere' and a 'female sphere', and the two halves of society had this sort of separate-but-equal thing going on. Most traditional histories focus on things like warfare and grand councils, which fall completely into the 'male sphere'. This is mostly due to the fact that 95% of literate people who had contact with the Iroquois at the time were men, and they were simply not allowed to be a part of the 'female sphere', so there are very few written sources about that 'female sphere'. Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas was the only book of the ones I read that really did the 'female sphere' justice.

Ok, I should also say that I am a feminist, and that one of the reasons I wanted to write my TL about an Iroquoian society was because I was interested in having a much earlier development of feminist ideas, and thought it would be interesting to have these feminist ideas come into Western culture from Native culture.
 
Sorry, just re-read your post and realized that you were asking specifically for information on the 'diggers' and 'levelers', which I don't have. Sorry. I think I got carried away by what I was excited about :p
 
Sorry, just re-read your post and realized that you were asking specifically for information on the 'diggers' and 'levelers', which I don't have. Sorry. I think I got carried away by what I was excited about :p

Oh definitely, I can understand getting excited. But yeah, managing to fenegle my way to an account from the anthropology department helps keep things fair. Although thanks for the references and I will look into those.
 
Sorry, just re-read your post and realized that you were asking specifically for information on the 'diggers' and 'levelers', which I don't have. Sorry. I think I got carried away by what I was excited about :p

I think we all get carried away by things we're interested in. Its best not to get me started about the LaFollette Family or Wisconsin Progressivism (as people on SHWI used to know full well, and used to give me crap for :p).

I don't have too much more to add, except that that sounds like a fascinating book. Usually my knowledge of Native tribes is firmly entrenched with the Ojibwa (and then, not so much their history as their mythology), and that knowledge isn't half as strong as I would wish it. I may have to check that book out!
 
There are a couple of obvious sources to consult, which you may or may not have already seen:

The clearest articulation of Leveler ideology came in the form of the Putney Debates of 1647 where leading Levelers within the New Model Army debated with the leaders of the Army [known as the Grandees]. Cromwell was present but it was his son-in-law, Henry Ireton, who was nominated as the spokesman for the Grandees.

The text is online here:
http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1647-the-putney-debates

And gives you the authentic voices of not just the Levelers but also the opposition to them.

As for the Diggers, Wikipedia is actually a good jumping off point. There is a whole list of original documents at the bottom that would give you contemporary Digger thought.

One example I thought seemed useful:

http://www.bilderberg.org/land/poor.htm

A couple of points to keep in mind though:

- Neither ideology was clearly defined as a faction - you could twist them in various ways. But a good starting point would be documents such as these.

- You would have to come up with a good reason for them to leave England, though, as both groups were rooted in Civil War and the aftermath.

- Just because they hold socially radical views does not mean they would necessarily have integrated well with Native Americans. Many were deeply religious as well and, like many early migrants to America, believed that God had swept aside the natives with sicknesses to allow them access to the land.

Not that any of these should stop your timeline, as this is AH, but just a couple of things to think about. Hope this helps.
 
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