“The merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions …” — The Declaration of Independence, 1776
It’s not just a line buried in eighteenth-century language. It is a statement that still echoes throughout policy, education, media, and the way the United States decides whose humanity is assumed and whose must constantly be defended.
“Merciless Indian Savage” is one of the earliest official summaries of how the country’s government chose to define Indigenous peoples, not as nations, not as human beings with sophisticated political systems, responsibilities to the lands, and complex societies, but as obstacles, as threats, as people who could be named in a way that justified removal.
That framing did not stay in 1776.
It moved forward. It shaped treaties that were signed, and then narrowed, reinterpreted, and later ignored. It justified boarding schools, where children were displaced from their communities and punished for being “Indian.” It rationalised laws that separated Indigenous peoples from their ceremonies, homelands, and in many cases, their families. It shows up in the way land, water, and other resources are consumed by the capitalist machines that drive this country.
The simplicity of the phrase is really the framework behind the government’s ideology that they can do whatever they want to Indigenous peoples and call it progress, a necessity, as part of civilization.
It was about permission. There is an inheritance in that phrase, not only grief, but clarity. The “founding fathers” did not have Indigenous peoples in mind, except as barriers to expansion. American patriotism often depends on forgetting that fact. It stands as evidence of the United States deliberately dehumanizing Indigenous peoples and casting them outside the boundaries of civilization, morality, and political legitimacy to justify dispossession.
And it is evidence of something else: despite centuries of policies built on that logic, Indigenous peoples refused to disappear. Languages are still spoken, Treaty rights are still fought for, and children are being raised to remember who they are.
There is temptation, especially in American civic culture, to soften the histories of the government’s atrocities against Native peoples. To say the language was “of its time.” But Indigenous peoples have always been asked to accept the violence of context while their own histories are flattened into footnotes.
So no, the framing “as a product of the past” is not acceptable.
There is power in rejecting what an entire government attempts to define a people as. There is also guttural exhaustion in having to repeatedly justify Indigenous existence to a nation that, from its very beginning, refuses to recognize Indigenous humanity.
The Declaration of Independence calls all Indigenous peoples “merciless Indian savages.”
Perhaps there is something worth in reclaiming that though.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of Native News Online’s America 250: A Republic Built on Native Land initiative.
Merciless in refusing to surrender languages. Merciless in carrying ceremonies forward. Merciless in remembering, despite every effort to force forgetting. Merciless in insisting that Indigenous nations remain sovereign, resilient, and present.
Those words don’t need to be carried solely as a wound. They can also be carried as evidence that the people whom the founders of the US believed could be erased refused to vanish.
Good.
Indigenous people remain. Still inconvenient. Still unbroken. Still merciless enough to survive everything that has been done, and continues to be done.
Indigenous resilience.
