This will be an online Zoom meeting. Please RSVP on our Meetup for this event to get access to the Zoom link. See our online meeting instructions at: https://torontooasis.org/online-meeting-instructions
Our program will run from 11 am to 12:30 pm. You can join the meeting starting at 10:45 am for our open social. After 12:30 pm, we will also have an extended discussion for half an hour, until 1:00 pm.
Westerners like to think that liberty and representative governance were invented in Europe but don’t necessarily know much about the variety of governance structures practiced worldwide. Before Columbus, the Americas had a population comparable to Europe but distributed over a much more diverse ecological and cultural landscape. In this talk, our featured speaker, Dr. Mark Reimers, will discuss what we think we know about two very different Native American societies that embodied principles of personal liberty or representative government.
The Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy was formed centuries before Europeans arrived and guaranteed personal freedom and a formal procedure to resolve conflicts; their society inspired the American founders.
Less known to Canadians, several Central American city-states practiced representative government for centuries. In particular, the Tlaxcalan multi-ethnic republic embodied even more egalitarian ideas than Athens. It held off the much larger Aztec empire for over a century; then, it fought the Spanish conquistadors to a standstill before allying with them to turn on their common enemy.
Many diverse examples of social and governance structures among the Native Americans are worth studying as we try to address some of the chronic problems of contemporary North American society.
Dr. Mark Reimers is a quantitative neuroscientist, whose research aims to uncover how dynamic brain activity gives rise to thoughts and feelings. Dr. Reimers has worked at the US National Institutes of Health, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics and at Michigan State University. His broader aim is to ground our understanding of feeling and thought in the facts of biology.
Dr. Reimers was the leader of the Richmond Humanists in Virginia for five years, and now leads the UU Forum in Lansing, MI, and speaks frequently at humanist and science outreach events in Michigan. He is trying to weave together humanist aspirations with neurobiology.
Please RSVP on Meetup to get access to the Zoom link:
https://www.meetup.com/toronto-oasis/events/301421372/
Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and perhaps some new ones!
This meeting will be recorded: GMT20240623-153535_Recording_1920x1080.mp4