The U.S. is celebrating its 250th birthday this summer. But native people are often left out of America’s founding narrative. Does uncovering that history change how we think of the country?

Guest

Rebecca Nagle, writer and activist. Citizen of the Cherokee nation. Host of the new podcast “First America.”

Ned Blackhawk, professor of history at Yale University. Author of many books, including “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

AMORY SIVERTSON: When you think of the Declaration of Independence, what comes to mind? Self-evident truths? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? All men being created equal? There’s something all the way down near the bottom of that founding document that Cherokee writer and journalist Rebecca Nagle says we don’t pay enough attention to.

Rebecca’s the host of First America, a new podcast that explores the ways indigenous people are left out of the story of the United States, including its founding. All this month, we’ve been examining the idea of America, and today we’re looking at Native America, which brings us right to that often-overlooked part of the Declaration of Independence.

Rebecca Nagle, what is it?

REBECCA NAGLE: That part of the Declaration of Independence calls Indigenous people ‘merciless Indian savages.’ So right next to those lofty Enlightenment ideals about all men being created equal, there is language in our founding document that our founders saw Indigenous people actually as less than human, as savages. And it’s not just a throwaway line. We’re all familiar with the preamble, the opening of the Declaration of Independence, but when you get to the meat and the heart of the document, it’s actually this list of grievances. It’s all these things that England and King George III have done that have angered the colonists, and these are their reasons for rebellion.

They’re justifying the war that they’re already in. And a lot of historians think that list actually has an order, and that the thing that is at the end is actually the most important. You can think of it almost like a crescendo. And that line is about the merciless Indian savages of the frontier and is really about Native people and Indian affairs.

SIVERTSON: So I want to talk more about that, but I do want to hone in on this term, the fact that this celebrated document of record uses a term like savages. What was the intention there?

NAGLE: Yeah, at the time, savages is also this sort of quasi-legal term where Europeans had divided the world into civilized nations and civilized people, and savages, and people who were deemed savage didn’t have the same kind of human rights, didn’t have the same kind of rights to property, didn’t have the same kind of rights under international law, what was forming as international law at the time.

And so that word has a lot of meaning behind it, and what the founders are saying with that word is that the government and the democracy that we’re creating, Native people aren’t a part of that. They’re not on the same status and the same level as we are. They’re beneath us is the message that word sends, in a very intentional way.

SIVERTSON: And the colonists accuse the Crown of, quote, “endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers,” essentially allowing Indigenous peoples to remain on land that the colonists wanted. What was the relationship between England and the Native peoples in America at that time?

NAGLE: Yeah, that’s a really good question, and this is something I’ve actually learned from reading Ned Blackhawk’s work and other scholars.

There’s this part of the reason that the American Revolution happened in the first place that we don’t tell as a country. So we tell the sort of taxation and representation story, but we don’t tell the part of the story where actually one of the main drivers of the American Revolution … was that the colonists wanted more Indigenous land, and England was telling them no.

And there was history behind that no. And there was an Indigenous-led uprising that had sacked a bunch of British-controlled forts, and England was basically looking at a very costly war, at a moment that it was broke from fighting other expensive, costly wars. And so instead of going to war with Indigenous nation, England decided, “All right, let’s make a compromise.”

And part of that compromise was drawing this line down the East Coast of the United States and saying, “Colonists, you can’t move west of the Appalachian Mountains.” And the colonists did not like that.

SIVERTSON: Okay, so this derogatory line about merciless Indian savages is grievance number 27 of 27 against the Crown, as you say, in a crescendo to this particular point.

And you view this particular grievance as a key reason that the American Revolution even happened. Can you explain that for us?

NAGLE: Totally. So after the king issues this proclamation, it’s called the Proclamation of 1763, but after the king says, “Colonists, you can’t move west of the Appalachian Mountains,” there is armed rebellion.

And when British soldiers go to trade and to cement peace accords with Indigenous nations, a backcountry militia attacks those British soldiers. And so this backcountry militia in Pennsylvania, they’re not attacking Indigenous people, they’re attacking British soldiers to try and prevent those British soldiers from making peace with Indigenous nations.

And so the way that we tell the story of the American Revolution as this sort of drumbeat of violence and conflict and rebellion and escalation happening in Boston over taxes, we talk about the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the shot heard round the world years before any of that, colonists were firing guns at British troops over Native land.

And so this idea of colonists rejecting the crown fashioning their own ideas around what they want to see in the continent of North America, that is happening over Native land actually before it’s happening over things like taxes. But for some reason, when we tell the founding story of the United States, we leave that part out.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, you say in the first episode of your podcast series, First America, that what’s missing from the story of America is the truth. And we’re going to be digging into that statement more over the course of the hour, but I’m curious what set you off on this truth-finding mission.

What told you that there was more to the story that needed to be told?

NAGLE: I think as a Native person living in the United States, you’re just used to it. It’s constant. Whether it’s a conversation about COVID or the census or in any kind of political discourse, we’re left out of the conversation, and history is the same way.

And almost every chapter of American history, if Native people are included, it’s passing mention. And I think as an Indigenous person, for a long time, I had this innate sense that what our country did to Native people, that it didn’t just affect us, right? That it affected all Americans, and that it was actually foundational to understanding our government.

But for a long time, that was just a hunch, and I didn’t have enough information to piece it together. And it was through working with historians like Ned that I got the receipts and really started to see that it’s not that just when we tell the founding story that we’re leaving Native people out and we should include them to be better and to be more diverse.

It’s actually that by leaving the Native part of the story out of the founding story of the United States, the story that we’ve been telling is wrong. It’s not what happened. And I think that has a lot to do with where we’re at right now as a country. I think there’s a lot of confusion around how we got here.

And I think that we don’t know how America got here because we don’t know how it started.

SIVERTSON: You’ve mentioned Ned Blackhawk a couple of times, so I wanna bring him into the conversation now. He’s a professor of history at Yale. He’s a member of the Te-Moak tribe of the Western Shoshone Indians and author of The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, which was the winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Ned Blackhawk, welcome to On Point.

NED BLACKHAWK: It’s nice to be with you.

SIVERTSON: It’s great to have you. And I’m curious on this point of revisiting history, your book is called The Rediscovery of America. So how were the stories of Native peoples rediscovered in this case? Especially because, as you note, these stories haven’t been told before in textbooks, in museums, in many cases, or plaques, or the myriad other ways that we typically preserve and pass down history.

BLACKHAWK: As Rebecca was suggesting, there is an incompleteness to the narrative of American history, particularly around its inability to recognize and incorporate the historical experiences of Native Americans. That recognition is something that many scholars and tribal members and others have recognized for quite some time.

And over the last two generations or so, there’s been a monumental realignment of how American history is presented, understood, and studied, particularly within the academic and scholarly world. It may not have reverberated much outside of these spaces, but we’re living through a moment of national reckoning, where for the first time, we’re able to begin having this conversation.

And if you were to look at, for example, the PBS series that Ken Burns and two other filmmakers made about the American Revolution, you’d see more than half a dozen Native American studies, scholars and others commenting on these subject matters. And that documentary really attempts to unsettle the familiar erasure or marginalization of Native Americans in our nation’s national narrative.

Part II

SIVERTSON: Ned, I want to pick up with a piece of history that Rebecca was starting to talk about before the break, and that has to do with what happened in the 1760s between colonists and Native peoples, specifically in Pennsylvania. Can you tell us that story?

BLACKHAWK: I’d be happy to, or portions of it.

There’s a monumental realignment that happens across eastern North America in the year of 1763, one of the most decisive years in American history. The year opens with the news of the Treaty of Paris having been signed, in which Britain obtains all of New France, or France’s former North American colonies that stretch from New Orleans up the Mississippi, across the Great Lakes, all the way to the Atlantic down the St. Lawrence Seaway.

And there’s enormous euphoria across British North America at the time. No one at the time could have anticipated that the colonists would have found themselves so dissatisfied and eventually organized against the monarchy, which they viewed as the most enlightened and reasoned political system in the world.

But a series of things start happening in the interior regions of that world that the French have transferred or ceded to the British. This is a world in which Native Americans dominate the trade, economic, political, and social landscapes, and they remind the English when they come to these former French forts that they are not conquered.

And a series of skirmishes and tensions turn into an uprising that summer of 1763, in which the Odawa leader Pontiac destroys nearly a dozen of the forts that the English have inherited from the French, forcing essentially the English crown back to either the battlefield or the negotiation table.

And as Rebecca mentioned one of the key resolutions of that conflict that year is the passage of the royal proclamation of October of 1763. So all of a sudden, a year that started with so much excitement and anticipation for the British colonists ends with them being curbed or limited in their expansionary efforts.

And the crown is telling them, the colonists want more land, and the crown is saying, “No, you cannot go west of the Appalachians. That’s Indigenous land.” And if one looks carefully at this period and at the British Empire at the time, one sees that the British Empire has inherited colonies all over the world, not just in North America.

They have inherited the Falkland Islands, or they’ve obtained them. They have negotiations about Caribbean islands that are unfolding. And so the Crown is undergoing this massive administrative reorganization on how to handle these newly conquered lands. And in Pennsylvania, the local settlers in many rural places are extremely suspicious and worried that the Crown is giving Native peoples too much recognition, too much autonomy, too much economic and even military assistance.

Those are the kind of sinews or the kind of everyday forms of trade that make this empire, this world run. People exchange goods, they exchange ammunition, they trade furs, they receive each other in council, and it’s necessary essentially to bring trade goods to cement, as Rebecca was saying, diplomatic accords.

So all of a sudden, throughout late 1763, 1764 into 1765, these local militias start forming that start targeting the institutions of British authority and even start attacking Native Americans. And it’s a deeply violent history that we’re not really that familiar with, and it stands in such contradistinction to the sets of policies that particularly the colony of Pennsylvania had long been known for.

And missionized Indians are massacred in December of 1763 at a place called Conestoga, and Benjamin Franklin of all people writes a 30-page pamphlet condemning this violence. So even some of our most kind of beloved or cherished founding fathers were abhorred and shocked to see this type of vigilantism pervading the colonial world.

SIVERTSON: And Rebecca, the leader of one of these militias in Pennsylvania, the Black Boys, James Smith refers to the Crown’s treaty with Native nations as an alliance with, quote, “The enemies of mankind.” So again, the choice of language, there feels telling. What does that say to you?

NAGLE: Yeah, I think at the same time that our founders are articulating these ideas of all men created equal, and what is humanity, right?

They’re drawing this line and saying, not only are Native people less than human, but that actually we’re the enemies of mankind. And so as our country is figuring out who we are, what our values are, what kind of government, what kind of democracy are we going to be, one of these really big founding ideals and ideas is this deep racialized hatred for Indigenous people.

And it’s very important that we tell that story because the founders just didn’t feel that way and do nothing about it, right? They felt that way, and then they made a lot of decisions. Generations of Americans made decisions and built up an arm of our government to dispossess indigenous people of our land, to colonize us.

And I think that a lot of people’s initial response to learning that is, “Oh, that’s so bad. That’s so terrible. We feel so bad for those native people.” And the response that I think we’re seeking for people to get with the podcast is not guilt, is not the idea we need to talk about these things so that we feel badly about it, but really that we see parts of our government and parts of our country that we’ve never really seen before, right?

Because the government that took native peoples’ lands, that colonized native people, that government is still our government, right? It’s not like it just went away. And so we have to really reckon with that as a country if we don’t want those types of things to continue to happen.

SIVERTSON: And your podcast is, in pointing out things like this line in the Declaration of Independence, it’s giving us a chance to relearn.

And another thing that I had to relearn listening to your podcast has to do with the Boston Tea Party. So as part of your reporting, you visited the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum in Boston, of course because of a detail about the Boston Tea Party of 1773 that not many people know about. Tell us about that.

NAGLE: Yes. So the Boston Tea Party is one of the most famous events leading up to the American Revolution. The colonists are mad about this tax on a tea. There are some other policies about the Tea Act that they really don’t like and to protest, they decide to throw tea into the harbor and commit, property destruction, basically.

And the part of the story that we don’t often tell is that they put on a costume to go and have this riot, and the costume was that of Native people. So they called themselves Mohawks. And a lot of people might hear that and think, “Oh, that was for a disguise. They wanted the British to blame the Mohawks.”

And it wasn’t a disguise. It was because pretending to be Indigenous in the early republic symbolized freedom and liberty and had this really important cultural significance as early Americans were figuring out their new national identity.

SIVERTSON: So that’s counterintuitive, that Native peoples would be a symbol of freedom at the same time that the colonists are not wanting Native peoples or are not behaving as if they want Native peoples to experience that level of freedom.

So make sense of that for me.

NAGLE: Yeah, no, it’s really complicated. And this comes from the work of historian Phil Deloria, who wrote this amazing book about it called Plain Indian and we interview him for the podcast so you can hear this in his own words. But Native people came to symbolize freedom because of how colonists experienced the continent of North America.

And so you have to remember at this time, it’s illegal to hunt in the king’s forest. It’s illegal to collect wood, to coming to North America and all of a sudden, you can go and you can hunt wild game, you can chop down a tree. There’s this way that the land of North America, in a very material way, becomes this land of freedom and abundance.

And so as colonists and also Native people are seen, and I don’t know that colonists fully understand Native societies at all, but they’re viewing them as maybe having more freedom than the colonists have themselves. You have to think about what life in Puritan New England is like. It’s not a particularly free society.

And as colonists are working out these ideas around freedom and liberty, Native people become a stand-in for it. But what you said, there’s this inherent contradiction baked into it, and the way I think about it is that the colonists liked the Native people of their imaginations. Those Native people had all of this freedom and all of this land that the colonists wanted for themselves.

But actual Native people, they despised those Native people. Those were the merciless Indian savages of the Declaration of Independence. And I think that contradiction, that irresolvable contradiction is part of how American identity was formed. It’s how early Americans forged a new nation, and I think there are ways that contradiction still shows up in American identity in the ways that we struggle with, really, struggle with who we are as a country.

SIVERTSON: So in the podcast, Rebecca, you ask the museum’s creative manager, Evan O’Brien, at the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum why they don’t place more emphasis on the fact that colonists dressed up as Native people to throw tea into the harbor. Here’s what he said.

EVAN O’BRIEN: So in all regards, we want to balance actually we want to strive for balance in both areas.

We want to be as authentic as possible, and the complexity with the Tea Party is in order to be fully authentic, you cannot ignore the Indigenous disguises that were involved. You simply can’t. However, we also want to be sensitive and not make any offense. History is complex. We can learn from it, but we also don’t want to repeat the same mistakes.

NAGLE: So do you guys think it would be racist basically to have white folks today dress up like Natives in your programming?

O’BRIEN: Yeah. We don’t allow that. We don’t do that in any capacity.

SIVERTSON: Rebecca, I’m curious for your reaction to that answer and whether you would want to see reenactors in Native dress at the museum.

NAGLE: My reaction is that I think I sympathize with Evan. I think he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. One of the other things he shared with me is that they’ve had reenactment events where volunteers showed up in racist character co- costumes of Native people.

And so obviously they don’t wanna encourage that. But then there’s this other side of the conflict where when you learn about early Americans, they were obsessed with indigenous people. We were omnipresent in their lives, and it’s not just the costumes at the Tea Party. They’re putting the figure of a Native person on guns, on ships, in political cartoons, on pamphlets.

They have weird societies where they dress up like Native people and give themselves Indian names and perform made-up rituals. They were obsessed. But then the way that we tell that story today, we erase the significance of Native people, and in that erasure, we actually, we don’t know how early Americans figured out what it meant to be American.

We don’t know how early Americans formed a national identity. And I think what I’m really interested in the being stuck between a rock and a hard place, I think I’m just really interested in that stuck, because I actually think the museum is this metaphor or this stand-in for how we deal with this history as a country.

And I should say, in fairness to the museum, there’s not, it’s not that there’s no mention of the Native costume. They do have some signage about it. It’s just that it’s easy to miss because it’s not emphasized. And I think it’s like the same thing with the Declaration of Independence.

It’s not like the ‘merciless Indian savages’ line has been erased from the Declaration of Independence. It’s not like when people print it, they cut that part out. It’s there. We just don’t know how to talk about it.

SIVERTSON: So Ned, I think something that a lot of people might not realize, myself included before this, is that thousands of Native peoples actually fought in the Revolutionary War, but not all on the same side.

So can you tell us a little bit about how Native peoples organized and allied themselves during the war?

BLACKHAWK: I’d be happy to. One of the misunderstandings people have about Native American history often is that there is a singular experience, when in fact there’s an extraordinary diversity and heterogeneity both across American history and now.

Tribal nations are distinct. They have different cultures, languages, religions, relationships with the federal government, and this was even more so true in the Revolutionary era. And it’s hard to make sense of the fact that native peoples might take up arms alongside colonial forces when the declaration is using this type of vilified or hateful language.

However, many had lived for generations in close proximity to their colonial neighbors in places like Massachusetts or in Connecticut, in portions of eastern New York State, in Rhode Island. Down into the Chesapeake there were thousands of Indian peoples who understood that the Crown was failing on a fundamental level, and many had sought redress for themselves unsuccessfully.

There’s a Wappinger Indian leader by the name of Daniel Nimham who leads a force of over 50 Wappinger native peoples in the New York battles and dies in those fateful campaigns. We’ve never even heard of this figure in most of American history. Why would Stockbridge Indians from Massachusetts or Wampanoag Indians from Martha’s Vineyard and/or Cape Cod take up arms in even sometimes greater proportion than their non-native neighbors?

It’s because of their own longstanding sets of concerns. That’s just one example of the complexity of this subject matter.

Part III

SIVERTSON: Rebecca, there’s a group of people, Native peoples known as the Haudenosaunee, which is actually a confederacy of Native groups. People may have heard of them referred to as the Iroquois. Who are they, and what role did they play during the Revolutionary War?

NAGLE: Yeah. Like Ned was discussing the Haudenosaunee Confederacy during the Revolution is actually split.

So part of the Confederacy fights on the side of the Americans, and part of the Confederacy fights on the side of the British. And in response to that, George Washington orders basically a scorched earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee that is now called Sullivan’s Campaign because that’s the name of the general that led it.

And we don’t learn about this, we don’t learn about this like other famous battles or moments in the Revolutionary War, but it’s actually quite huge. So a third, an entire third of the continental army goes off to fight it, and what they do is that they invade Haudenosaunee territory, which is in what is today kind of northern and western New York around the Finger Lakes and they burn towns to the ground.

And so they burn food stores, they burn the crops in the fields. The goal is really to make the people starve. They even chop down and destroy fruit orchards so that if people come back, there won’t be any food. In one early massacre, militiamen write about killing children and spearing them with bayonets, so it’s extremely violent.

The survivors of that violence go to a British-controlled fort and stay the winter there, but British don’t really give them enough food or shelter. And historians estimate that between direct killing and then malnutrition and exposure, about half the population died. So I think when we tell the story of the Revolutionary War, we tell the story as it’s David versus Goliath, and we get to be David, and Britain is Goliath, and we’re the good guys.

But the Revolutionary War is actually a sprawling conflict with Indigenous nations fighting on both sides over who will control the continent of North America. And to stake out their claim, what is that the early United States and the Continental Army is willing to commit acts of genocide.

And there are these extremely violent campaigns where the stated purpose, from people like George Washington is to make people make civilian populations starve.

SIVERTSON: Ned, we’ve talked about how Native peoples were incorporated into the Declaration of Independence. What about the U.S. Constitution?

What did our new nation put into writing?

BLACKHAWK: In the two most important documents in American history, the Declaration, which establishes the justifications for the United States’ independence, and then the Constitution, which sets in motion a governing structure, Native peoples are mentioned. In the Constitution, which comes obviously after the Revolution and after a very turbulent and uncertain era known as the Articles of Confederation, the independent Republic of the United States is teetering on collapse after the Revolution is concluded.

They lack all kinds of what we would consider everyday forms of governance. There’s no standing military. There are no easy ways of passing legislation. Quorum is rarely established when Congress meets. So in the process of reconstituting the United States, the colonists turned independent statesmen start ceding inherent authorities to the new federal government that they’re creating.

And of those inherent authorities is the power, the exclusive power, constitutionally speaking, of the federal government to regulate and interact with Indian affairs. No states, no municipality, no local governments have that power in the United States, and even though it’s undetermined at the time, the establishment of the power of the federal government over Indian Affairs and the Commerce Clause sets in motion what will become the doctrine of inherent recognized sovereign authority that tribal nations have as they’re equated alongside states and foreign nations in the Commerce Clause itself.

SIVERTSON: So I want to jump to today a little bit because Rebecca, you were in Minneapolis doing some reporting for this series when Renée Nicole Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in January of this year, and you draw a line between some of the discourse around ICE’s presence in Minneapolis and other American cities and the way that you think we should be thinking about our country’s indigenous history.

Can you lay that out for us?

NAGLE: Yeah, and I’d like to just tell the story of that day. So I was visiting a historic site called Fort Snelling with historian Nick Estes, who’s also part of the podcast, and he was telling me the history of what had happened at that fort, which is in the 1860s. It was a concentration camp for Dakota people, and Dakota people were detained there and then shipped out of the state of Minnesota because the state of Minnesota wanted to expel all Dakota people from its borders.

And while we were there, Nick got a call from his partner to see if he had seen the news, and it was the day that ICE had shot and killed Renée Good. And I stayed in Minneapolis to report on what was then unfolding. And the next morning, I was back at Fort Snelling, but this time not to visit the fort, but to go to a protest, because the ICE headquarters in Minneapolis is on the greater Fort Snelling campus, because it’s still federal land.

And so where ICE was detaining people that they were picking up during the Operation Metro Surge was on the same area of land where the fort was and where the historic fort now stands. And it’s federal land because it was once a military reservation. And so you have the U.S. federal government doing the same thing in the same place, rounding people up, detaining them.

But the reason that it’s happening there goes back to this Indigenous history and this history that as a country we really don’t know how to talk about. And I think, and now I’m gonna talk really big picture. And this actually comes from Ned’s wife’s scholarship, Maggie Blackhawk. But I think for a long time, we’ve thought about the health of our democracy as who can vote, whether people are treated equally and treated fairly by the government.

And what we have not thought about is how the U.S. has treated people outside, people who aren’t considered U.S. citizens. And so the first group of people are Indigenous people, right? So at the founding we’re not U.S. citizens, we don’t become citizens until the 1920s. But we have this long-standing relationship with the federal government, and how the federal government treats us is very different than what we think of as democracy.

And in the podcast we argue that actually it’s not democratic. It’s top-down. At different times in U.S. history the federal government has come into Indigenous communities, has told us not only where we can live, but where we can even go and move what food we will eat, how we can farm, how we can raise our children, if we can even keep our children or have children.

And that’s not democratic, and you can call it colonialism, but I think another very accurate word to describe it is authoritarianism, right? That’s it’s non-representative government, it’s top-down, it’s unilateral authority, it’s controlling people’s lives down to the ground. And so these moments that we see in our country today that feel anti-American, that feel un-American, that feel unprecedented, that feel the opposite of what a democratic society should be or that we see our country as, a lot of those things actually go back to what our government did to Indigenous people.

I’m just going to give a couple very quick examples. President Trump starting a war with Iran invading Venezuela and abducting the leader, bombing boats in the Caribbean, all without congressional oversight. Actually the first undeclared wars that the U.S. fought without a formal declaration of war from Congress are during the George Washington’s administration, so way back at the founding, and it’s wars with indigenous people.

… You can also look at birthright citizenship, where Trump, everybody’s arguing everyone who’s been born on U.S. soil since the 14th Amendment, maybe except for diplomats and these rare exceptions, has been a U.S. citizen, and the Trump administration came back and said actually native people were born on U.S. soil and weren’t considered U.S. citizens.

And that’s true. That’s a real example. We were carved out of the 14th Amendment, and today the Trump administration is using that example to attack the citizenship of the children of immigrants.

SIVERTSON: I want to jump in there, Rebecca, for a second, because if we talk about what the Trump administration is doing, and in the larger scope of this conversation where we’ve been talking about history that has never been known, but also history now we’re seeing that is being removed, we’re including the changing of names of landmarks that previously had indigenous names like Denali in Alaska, which is now Mount McKinley, and removing some of the indigenous history from the Smithsonian and national parks. Rebecca, are you feeling a new sense of urgency to share this history?

NAGLE: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the urgency, the reason that the fight over truth in our founding is so bitter is because power flows from the truth. And if as American citizens we don’t know what our government is if we don’t understand it, we can’t change it. We can’t affect it.

And so this information isn’t just for honesty or for morality, but it’s really so that we as U.S. citizens can know what our government is. And what I hear constantly in this moment is people making comparisons to foreign countries, right? To looking to Putin’s Russia or Hungary or even Nazi Germany.

And to understand authoritarianism, we actually don’t have to leave the United States. We have examples from right here in our own history, and if we actually understand where it comes from, then we can root it out. Because otherwise it’ll be like chopping the head off a weed. We can maybe defeat part of it, we can win one election, but unless we root it out, it will just come back.

SIVERTSON: So Ned, this brings me to the question, with things like Rebecca’s podcast, things like your book, The Rediscovery of America, these sources do the work of offering this history to the public. But what can the public do in the face of a federal government and administration that currently seems intent on some would say ignoring it, some would say burying it?

What are your thoughts on this?

BLACKHAWK: I’m much less familiar with the changing dynamics of our daily political scene the way Rebecca or other journalists like yourself likely are. So I may not be the best person to ask about these things, but I do believe, as I said earlier, as I write about, that there are, as Rebecca’s suggesting, inherent truths in American history that once rediscovered or once understood, give us the capacity to see ourselves differently and imagine alternative futures both for ourselves and ideally for our children.

SIVERTSON: So this is a question for both of you. As we look towards the 250th anniversary of America, I’m curious if you will be commemorating this milestone in any way and what that will look like for you.

NAGLE: Oh, that’s a great question. I often celebrate the 4th of July. I’m not this year just because I have other familial obligations, but yeah, I like fireworks. I love barbecue. And so I don’t think, I’m not here to say that because the Declaration of Independence has this racial slur in it, nobody can celebrate the 4th of July.

But I think if we’re gonna celebrate the founding of the United States, we should celebrate all of it, if we’re proud to be American, we should be proud of all of it. And we have to embrace the complexities of our history and to let go of these myths and these half-truths.

Because I am still here wanting, I think, wanting the United States to be better, wanting our democracy to realize aspects of the government that I feel like we’ve never really fully reckoned with. To me, that’s also patriotism. And so again, I would just say, if we’re going to celebrate the United States this 4th of July on the 250th anniversary, let’s tell the whole story and celebrate not the mythical version, but the truth.

SIVERTSON: Ned we’re short on time here, but last word to you. I’m curious how you think about this anniversary and what it will look like for you.

BLACKHAWK: I’m not sure I have a really clear understanding of how my day will go on the 4th. But I do anticipate joining fellow citizens in in the evening for a fireworks display and enjoying the holiday feel that the 4th always brings, whether you’re with or without Native guests or friends at the time.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.