Transcription
Ah, America! 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. A milestone likely to be celebrated with the familiar spectacle of the 4th of July: block parties, legal or illegal fireworks, and the all-so-comforting barbecue. It's also a time to look back on the past 250 years and reflect on American independence.
But before we get the party started, let's look at the document that has since inspired every freedom lover's favorite holiday. Ah, yes! All the greatest hits. “Decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Very nice. “All men are created equal.” Classic line. And, wait a minute. “Merciless Indian savages.” The one and only time Native Americans are mentioned. Now, this has really got me thinking. Can a national identity built on the erasure of Native genocide ever fully separate itself from propaganda?
This is we the people of Native America. With me, Tai Leclaire. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stand. One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Do you remember reciting this mandatory allegiance before school? Well, maybe not those born after us millennials.
America often frames democracy as one of its greatest achievements. The irony of it is that Natives were the ones to inspire it. Well, obviously not the "merciless Indian savages" line. Even though American Indians were seen as primitive, we've practiced representative governance well before the American Revolution. Around 1142, according to many scholars, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, previously referred to as the Iroquois Confederacy, was formed, establishing relationships between tribal nations, which resulted in a democracy that has functioned for centuries. Within the Confederacy, they solidified an oral constitution described as the Great Law of Peace, which is considered one of the oldest living participatory democracies in the world.
If you didn't know, I’m Mohawk. One of the six nations that make up the Confederacy. There's Mohawk, Oneida, then Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. Some of America's founding fathers were aware of the Haudenosaunee form of government, and some, like Benjamin Franklin, even met with members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, resulting in the blueprint for the U.S. Constitution. You can argue that tribal nations have been a model for democracy centuries before the U.S. started branding itself as the global founder. Of course, this information rarely makes it into textbooks, which is probably the reason why we have yet to receive any recognition. As always, U.S. propaganda gets in the way of the truth.
Okay. So let's say the U.S. didn't invent democracy, but they did fight for independence. So they can get a little thing called liberty. Right? I guess to them, liberty means freedom to embark on brutal invasions and occupation of Indigenous lands. But before we get ahead of myself, in 1754, the French and British went to war over a land dispute in the Ohio Valley. Today, this war is referred to as the French and Indian War. This war had more to do with which colonizing country would expand their territory into North America. And different tribal nations made strategic decisions to side with either Great Britain or France, depending on who a tribe thought would be better to them. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy sided with Britain, while France worked with various tribes like the Algonquin.
Another thing I bet you didn't learn in school: after the British victory, the colonists set their sights on westward expansion. The British tried to stop this expansion, not out of the kindness of their heart, but because endless frontier wars were draining their resources. To pay off their debt, the British Parliament ramped up their taxation of the colonies. The colonists, of course, weren't too happy about that. After the colonists were denied their dreams of free reign, westward expansion while incurring more taxes, they were itching to cast off British rule, resulting in the Revolutionary War, which officially broke out in 1775. Among the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, the founders cite the Crown's failure to protect colonists from the merciless Indian savages.
I think it's about time that we bring in an actual expert to help us understand the lasting impact of the Declaration of Independence. Doctor Stephanie Fryberg is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. We've been discussing the Declaration of Independence and the phrase "merciless Indian savage." Can you describe how this language can affect a person's beliefs about a group of people?
Historically, it was a term that was used to justify the dispossession of our land, the exclusion of our people from the emerging frameworks of law, and instead, it renders us a threat that needs to be managed rather than a people to be respected. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he did not have Black or Native Americans in that vision. We were not seen as the people who he saw life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as being for. In this case, the document functions as two things at once. It's a promise of universal freedom, and an explicit dehumanization of the continent's original peoples, right of us.
Many tribes tried to avoid involvement in the Revolutionary War, viewing it as a dispute between the Crown and its colonies. But after the British made claims that they would help stop settler expansion, many tribes decided to back Britain. After the colonists won the war, this was used as an excuse to raid and settle on Native lands, despite some Native tribes even fighting under George Washington. At the war's end, the Crown ceded all of its land east of the Mississippi to the new country, making Native land free for the taking.
America and Britain would go to war again in 1812. This is also the second time they've called conflict with the natives as an excuse for war. Echoing the Declaration of Independence, the new country accused the British of arming Native American tribes in order to resist U.S. expansion. At the center of that resistance was Tecumseh, translation "Shooting Star," a Shawnee leader who had spent years uniting tribes across the East into a single confederacy to prevent American expansion. To many Native American communities, he was one of the last real chances to stop settler invasion. After Tecumseh's death during the war, his coalition collapsed and the organized Native resistance east of the Mississippi never recovered. To further the blow, about 20 years after these wars, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Incoming: government surveyors who dictated where Native Americans were allowed to live, inevitably forcing tribes to march wherever these areas were determined.
Let's take a look at some national symbols that help define America, and how they evolved into tokens of patriotism. Or rather, propaganda. Soon after the founding of the country, the belief that the United States was destined to expand its territory from sea to shining sea grew in popularity. Known as Manifest Destiny, this ideology was rooted in ideas of American exceptionalism and justified this westward expansion as a God-given right. The poster child for this message? Uncle Sam. In the early 1800s, Uncle Sam was no caricature, but likely inspired by a real-life figure, a military meat supplier named Samuel Wilson, who soldiers called Uncle Sam. Soon after, a cartoon version of Uncle Sam became an ambassador for Manifest Destiny. And Uncle Sam had some assistance from his female counterpart, Lady Columbia, whose name was inspired by Christopher Columbus, even though Columbus sparked a whole genocide of Native Americans without even setting foot on U.S. soil. Anyway, by the late 1800s, Uncle Sam began his rise to national fame on pages of American magazines and newspapers. Later, finding a home in the very political magazine titled Puck. Puck was the first successful American satirical magazine featuring political cartoons. In those cartoons, he had the job of convincing settlers that Native Americans didn't have any ownership of their own land, and demanded that Indigenous people either give up their ancestral lands or be pushed out by war. And pushed out by war they were.
There were so many wars between Native tribes and the settlers that they're often lumped together as the Indian Wars, a convenient way of sanitizing history for modern audiences by minimizing the magnitude of genocide settlers inflicted on tribes and their populations. These wars included roughly 40 Native conflicts and 1500 battles. In fact, one could argue many were not really wars at all, but rather massacres that included deaths of women, children, and elders, not just soldiers. And hey, it's all about branding.
Now that we established Uncle Sam's true nature of a mascot image used as a propaganda tool to promote genocide, how about we hear from Doctor Fryberg and her thoughts on the matter? So we have just gone over the idea of Manifest Destiny, and Uncle Sam's role in that. What is your perspective in response to these topics?
These ideas of Manifest Destiny, these ideas of Uncle Sam, are merely more representations that justify what has happened, that justify American society, that justifies the erasure and dehumanization of Native people. And, you know, certainly if God meant for us to be put in that place, it becomes so much easier for people to kill, maim, you know, take our land, take our items, take our practices, that of agriculture, and then dispossess us of them. Right. And even own the things that we did bring.
So Uncle Sam was a propaganda tool that became a mascot. Well, what about another USA mascot? The bald eagle. They are so revered that they are directly protected under at least two federal laws. However, long before the eagle became the national bird and the official seal of the United States, it had a distinct religious and cultural significance among Native Americans. In fact, because of these distinctions, today only tribal citizens can legally possess feathers for religious and cultural purposes. The bald eagle is unique to the North American continent and represents strength, courage, and freedom. So of course, this symbol would be repackaged by settlers and branded as a symbol of American national identity.
Speaking of national identity, let's talk about citizenship. Over time, the U.S. government began to change its policy from one of elimination to assimilation. One way it did this was by offering citizenship through an 1887 law called the Dawes Act. Before that, Native Americans had been excluded from birthright citizenship because under the Constitution and early federal law, they weren't considered American citizens. The Dawes Act offered citizenship to individual Native Americans in exchange for giving up their land and their cultural identity tied to it. For many Native nations, land was not simply property to be bought and sold, but it was the foundation of their kinship systems. Think agricultural traditions, spiritual practices, and their own way of governance. These systems depended on shared responsibility of the land, rather than individual ownership, something that the Dawes Act sought to dismantle in order to urbanize Native Americans into white Christian culture and traditions. The Dawes Act opened the door for conditional granting of citizenship. And shortly after came another method: war.
Oh. And. Oh. Who’s that? It's our old friend, Uncle Sam. Popular culture remembers Uncle Sam as a beloved patriotic uncle who gained prolific status during the First World War by asking, "I want you for U.S. Army." Most ironically, Uncle Sam would become the U.S.' most loyal salesman. During the time of Uncle Sam's enlisting propaganda, Native Americans would have the highest per capita rates of any racial group to join the country's military. One of the most prominent examples of that service, other than being the largest population to serve in the military, comes from the Navajo Code Talkers. In both World War I and World War II, 14 tribes used their languages to create unbreakable codes for the military to communicate in battle. To this day, Navajo remains the only unbroken code in all of modern military history. Anyway, 12,000 Native Americans served in World War I. Those veterans and many of their families were finally granted citizenship in 1919. A few years later, this was extended to all Native Americans under the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, the last racial group to be formally granted citizenship. Today, Native Americans are considered dual citizens: citizens of their respective tribal nations, the other, the United States.
Let's go back to Doctor Fryberg. We've talked a lot about the discrepancies between America's supposed ideals and the experience of Native people. So much of this idea about what it means to be American is tied up in these ideas, but it was never intended to be true for us. And I think that sub-humanization of Native Americans is really a central piece to understanding why today we could even question the citizenship of Native Americans. What does dual citizenship mean to you as a citizen of your tribal nation and the U.S.?
This is my ancestral homeland where my people live, is where my ancestors lived. And, you know, continuing to be connected to that land and understanding the importance of that land for my identity and my children's identity is really important. But, hey, at least after granting citizenship, we had access to all these amazing freedoms, right? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Beyond land, this same system of dispossession extended into our spiritual practices. Or should I say, our illegal spiritual practices. Just like birthright citizenship, the Constitution's First Amendment did not originally apply to us. And even after gaining citizenship, the U.S. spent the next 50-plus years basically just ignoring it. In 1978, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedoms Act. And I'm not kidding, it has not even been 50 years since we could legally practice our own religion on our own land.
Another thing you probably didn't know since our modern history is rarely taught. According to Doctor Fryberg’s research, over 87% of references to Native Americans in state academic standards were in a pre-1900 context. The best we get in American classrooms is stories like Sacagawea, aiding Lewis and Clark as they surveyed uncharted land. She's often viewed as a willing guide, but the reality was that Sacagawea wasn't given a choice to join the expedition, and the money for her services was given to her French-Canadian husband, who had bought and kept her as property. Oftentimes, American education reframes Native Americans as willing participants in their own colonization, and these ideas have become mainstream due to the American education system.
A more obvious example: Thanksgiving. Schools love to romanticize the story as one of cooperation between Native Americans and the colonists. But that version leaves out that after the harvest feast, broken treaties between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag led to one of the deadliest wars in colonial history.
To finalize this episode, and given the context of your work, Doctor Fryberg, what would you like people to take away?
We find that the more people believe that we're people of the past, the more they minimize the racism that our people experience, the more acceptable they think these racialized characterizations are. And so we have to undo these historical untruths, you know, and recognize that terms like "merciless Indian savage" were terms that came about merely to dispossess us, not because that's how we were, but because that's how America needed to be able to see us to justify taking from us.
Thank you so much for your time throughout this episode, Doctor Fryberg. Now, what's to be taken away from the centuries of history we've discussed today? Clearly, the story of American independence that most of us are familiar with has a very specific audience. It justifies certain people's actions by erasing the experience of others. And those others tend to have a common recurring theme. When founding fathers, America's secular saints, called us "merciless Indian savages" in the Declaration of Independence, they made it clear that America wasn't for us. So 250 years later, we have to ask, whose Independence Day?
Okay, now we can party!