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The United States turned 250 this year, and the document officiating its birth, the Declaration of Independence, is famous for its opening lines proclaiming the nation’s freedom from England and the rights of men. But Rebecca Nagle, a journalist and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, frames the document differently, describing it as a list of grievances growing in ascending order, where Native people, smeared as “merciless Indian savages,” are the founders’ biggest “problem.”

This characterization rendered Native Americans as less than human and as part of the natural world, over which settlers believed they had God-given dominion, justifying genocide and land theft. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 reflected a general sense of antagonism toward Native peoples. Yet three years earlier, during the Boston Tea Party, Nagle notes, settlers dumped tea into the harbor while wearing Native clothing. This raises questions about whether early Americans wanted to get rid of Indigenous people — or become Indigenous themselves.

Nagle’s new podcast “First America” asks how the American public missed this tension. The project features a group of Native scholars, including Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Ojibwe), Ned Blackhawk (citizen of Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone), Phil Deloria (Standing Rock and Yankton Sioux Tribes), and Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe).

In the interview that follows, Nagle discusses how colonists have appropriated Native identity, how Indigenous diplomacy exerted real influence over American founding documents, and how we can find authoritarianism in U.S. history.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

The Anti-Indigenous Slur in the Declaration of Independence Speaks Volumes

Petala Ironcloud: You say the founders’ final grievance in the Declaration of Independence was “merciless Indian savages.” Why do you think that’s been erased from how we teach the Revolution, and what changes once you put it back in?

Rebecca Nagle: We like to tell the story of the Revolution as David standing up to Goliath — England is the more powerful bad guy, and our founders were brave, loved freedom and liberty and democracy, and threw off the king to establish a better form of government. Even people who are critical of the founders, who’d say obviously they weren’t including everyone in that vision of democracy, still want to hold on to the kernel of democratic hope the Revolution represents.

The founders were saying Indigenous people were something less than human. There’s deep racial animus in that line.

The founders were saying Indigenous people were something less than human. There’s deep racial animus in that line.

When you bring Native people into focus, it’s really different. The founders weren’t just fighting England; both leading up to the Revolution and during the war itself, the Revolution was also about land, about who would control the continent of North America. The part of the Declaration we like to teach is “all men are created equal,” and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But there’s also a line about “merciless Indian savages.” Savages is a word the founders used on purpose — in the late 1700s, it meant someone was less than human, that they didn’t have the same rights as “civilized” people, as the people of Europe. Alongside those Enlightenment ideas, the founders were saying Indigenous people were something less than human. There’s deep racial animus in that line, and it doesn’t fall out of the sky.

England, having financial problems, couldn’t afford to keep fighting wars with Indigenous nations. After an Indigenous uprising sacked a string of British forts in North America, the Crown decided to make peace — which meant telling colonists they couldn’t move further west. The king drew a line down the Appalachian Mountains. That really angered the colonists, who wanted to expand and saw that land as already theirs. The hunger for Indigenous land, and England’s refusal to let colonists take more of it, is one of the main reasons the Revolution happened in the first place.

You argue the founders built both a democracy and an empire, and that the two can’t coexist. What does that tension look like today?

The mythical version of the founding — the “No Kings” version — is that the founders threw off monarchy and tyranny and created a democracy instead. But almost immediately, they got busy building an empire with colonial forms of government not that different from England’s. They were conscious of it — they called it an “empire of liberty.” As they mapped how the U.S. would expand into what’s now the Great Lakes region, they called it “America’s first colony.” The same summer they were writing the Constitution, they were drafting a blueprint for American colonialism.

The hunger for Indigenous land, and England’s refusal to let colonists take more of it, is one of the main reasons the Revolution happened in the first place.

The hunger for Indigenous land, and England’s refusal to let colonists take more of it,........

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