Happy July Fourth From Your Friendly Local ‘Merciless Indian’

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By Shaun Griswold

July 04, 2025

Guest Opinion. I don’t skip over any words in the Declaration of Independence. 

I find and lose meaning in the words that give Americans this day, this Independence Day, the ability to pop out and show the entire neighborhood how much they paid for the booms some of us light freely into the sky.

[Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in "Source NM" in July 2024. Used with permission. All rights reserved.]

For me the Fourth is a day off work to barbecue and watch a few artillery shells explode over Albuquerque that someone may have brought from Texas or Oklahoma.

These are the truths I made self-evident in my Indigenous American life as I read the words from the declaration that colonists used to become U.S. royalty and mark its enemy, i.e. people like me, to westward expansion. 

The declaration that set out to create the destructive government on this day in 1776 wanted to control new territories on the continent. The British monarchy, which wanted to move west from the Atlantic itself, needed to get out of the way.

The Declaration of Independence lists “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

This is the part where Americans build an identity of separation from British rule. To remove oneself from an oppressive government. Ideas about taxation without representation. A belief that a common enemy is harming the progress of those free men in their pursuit of their God-given fortune.

And in true American xenophobia, the founders used the last line in its statement of “Facts” to blame a group of people it exploited, marginalized and rendered voiceless.

“He 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.”

With that part included in its Declaration of Independence, the U.S. declared to the people living on this continent for millennia that any deviance from this new government would contribute to domestic insurrection, and those people would be marked as “merciless Indian Savages.”

It became the very foundation for Native American people’s relationship with the federal government — from the battles for our very existence to the rights we should receive after U.S. citizenship was established in 1924: access to health care, land and education to build the societies we are working on now.

I just read “merciless Indian Savage” again to myself and looked around at the people sitting in my living room in Albuquerque, New Mexico, right now who are from Zuni, Jemez, Laguna, Diné, Comanche, Cherokee, Kewa and Taos. 

I read it to them. A mix of sadness, anger and laughter filled the room, because sometimes that’s all you can do when faced with this country’s hypocrisy.

I see mercy in all their faces. They show it in the work they do in education, law enforcement, arts and health care. They pray to it with songs and ceremonies once banned and punished under the authority of documents like the Declaration of Independence.

Call me and all my relations merciless when you read the Declaration of Independence today. Read it out loud. Say the words. Do not skip them. Live with them.

Then seek the truth.

We merciful NDNs exist in this country, some of us thrive in it publicly and privately. Many of us are like you and doing our best. We do this despite the objectification, justification for genocide and general degredation of our Indigenous being in a document that forms a hypocritical government meant to give rights to all men. 

We’re not the only ones living with ultra-resilient DNA, this country’s foundation of injustice makes a lot of us built differently, Native or not.

I won’t tell you too much about what this country is or where it will go. I’m trying my best to figure it out. The Fourth of July can be a space for reflection on the values we want, but that is also so warped that I don’t even think we know how to define “value” beyond what a store would print on a receipt.

Truth is a value I will always stand by. It’s core to my soul. My truth in the Fourth of July is a celebration of the merciless Indians slandered when this country started, and our persistence for truth and justice. 

And for myself, that is clearly evident.

Shaun Griswold is a tribal citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna, whose ancestry also includes Jemez and Zuni on the maternal side of his family. He is the "Native News Online" senior reporter for our Cultivating Culture project. 

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