Photo by Charles Criscuolo
If you wonder why some Native Americans have a complicated approach to celebrating the 250th birthday of America, you do not have to look any further than the Declaration of Independence. It is America’s founding document filled with revolutionary ideals- a political declaration and statement of principles. Many might be shocked to find that the Declaration of Independence also contains very negative references to the Native American peoples that were America’s original inhabitants.
When listing the reasons why America was instituting a new government, Thomas Jefferson, principle writer of the Declaration, focused on Britain’s King George III. Among the list of grievances the King committed against the colonists, Jefferson lists:
He [King George III] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
This description of Native Americans in the Declaration of Independence sadly reflects the attitudes and wartime rhetoric of the time- reducing diverse Native nations to a hostile stereotype. Thomas Jefferson accuses King George of encouraging attacks on frontier settlements by those Native Americans that allied with the British during the American Revolutionary War. Some say Jefferson was only referring to those Natives that sided with the British against the colonists. Nevertheless his statement about merciless Indian savages still ran directly against the Declaration’s core ideal that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Ironically the Declaration’s statement about merciless Indian Savages reveals that many in colonial America failed to recognize Native nations as complex societies that had flourished in North America for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Colonists simply saw North America as land available for European settlement, with indigenous peoples as inherently barbaric peoples to be displaced. Native sovereignty was usually dismissed, and of the hundreds of treaties formed between colonists and Native Americans, few were respected over the long term.
As the new nation grew, conflicts over land intensified. Decades of warfare, broken treaties, and forced removals followed- and vast ancestral lands were eventually lost by many Native nations. This history helps explain why America’s 250th founding celebration evokes mixed emotions for many Native people today.
