Opinion for America 250: A Republic Built on Native Land
During the 1990s, I served as the executive director of an urban Native American center in Grand Rapids. One day, my administrative assistant interrupted me to say that a high school student had come into the center and wanted to meet with me. I told her to send the student into my office.
The student was an Odawa teenager. Fighting back tears, she told me she was quitting school. Her teacher had given her a failing grade on a test because she refused to accept that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and their contemporaries were her “Founding Fathers.”
For this young Native woman, they were not. They were the architects of a nation built on the dispossession of her ancestors. Faced with the choice of denying her own history or accepting a failing grade, she chose to stand by the truth as she understood it.
She was both angry and hurt.
I told the student not to quit high school. Instead, I urged her to meet with the school principal. Education, I explained, was far too important to abandon over a disagreement with a teacher. Assuming the teacher was nearing retirement age and perhaps set in his ways, I asked how old he was.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “He’s in his mid-20s.” Shaking my head, I thought that some things never change.
As America marks its 250th anniversary, I am reminded that Native Americans constantly navigate the tension of being dual citizens—citizens of our tribal nations and citizens of the United States. We often find ourselves balancing two histories, two identities, and two truths.
In many ways, we are like that young Odawa student. Faced with a choice, she stood with her Indigenous identity and the history of her people rather than accept a narrative that did not reflect her reality. Her struggle was not unique. It is a struggle Native people continue to confront as we reconcile our place within a nation that celebrates its founding while too often overlooking the cost of that founding to the first peoples of this land.
I understood her conflict because I had experienced my own.
When I was in the eighth grade, I faced a moment that shaped my coming of age as a Native person and forever changed how I viewed the founding of the United States.
As a child, I was an avid reader. My mother regularly took my siblings and me to the local public library, where I devoured biographies of Nathan Hale, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Paine and other figures from the American Revolution. Like many young Americans, I admired them.
Then came the day my eighth-grade history class was assigned to read the Declaration of Independence silently from our red, white and blue history textbook.
As I read the words penned by Thomas Jefferson, I recognized how American Indians were viewed historically. The same man who wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” continued later in the document with these words: “…the merciless Indian Savages…”
Sitting in the back of the classroom, I stopped reading as the stark statement caught me by surprise. I leaned back in my chair and hit my head against the cinder-block wall behind me. In an instant, everything changed. The image I had formed of America’s founding fathers collided with the realization that they had viewed Native people like my family as obstacles to be conquered rather than human beings deserving of dignity.
I thought about my relatives, and the Native people I knew. They were many things, but they were not “merciless Indian savages.” At that exact moment an enlightenment came to me that changed how I viewed American history ever since. I understood that I could no longer view American history through a single lens. I had to learn to see it through the eyes of a Native person—someone whose ancestors experienced the founding of this nation very differently than the heroes described in my textbooks.
Those words by Jefferson, portraying Indians in such a negative light, have angered me since the eighth grade. They were not written in a vacuum. They helped justify what was about to unfold as the founders of this nation looked westward and set their sights on Native homelands. They helped justify the notion that taking Native land was part of Manifest Destiny, the God-given right to expand across the North American continent.
Calling our ancestors “merciless Indian savages” helped lay the groundwork for a republic built on Native land.
Now, as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I find myself reflecting on that document and the contradictions it contains. What strikes me most is how familiar those tactics remain. Then, Native people were depicted as obstacles to progress in order to justify the taking of our lands. Today, the federal government often uses similar rhetoric to justify harsh actions against immigrants deemed undesirable—many of them targeted because the color of their skin is darker than those who hold power.
History may not repeat itself exactly, but it often echoes. The language used to dehumanize people has changed over time, yet its purpose remains the same: to make injustice easier to accept.
As a dual citizen of the United States and the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, I find it difficult to wrap myself in the red, white, and blue out of blind patriotism. Patriotism, to me, requires honesty.
It is hard to embrace the flag when I see this nation drifting backward, willing to weaken protections once guaranteed by the Voting Rights Act. It is hard to embrace the flag when so many Americans accept a leader, President Donald J. Trump, who traffics in daily falsehoods and asks the public to accept repetition as truth.
Years ago, a silent reading of the Declaration of Independence changed me forever. It forced me to confront the contradictions embedded in the nation’s founding and to see my place within them. Since then, I have come to understand that, as a Native person, I live with the constant tension of dual citizenship—citizenship in a tribal nation that predates the United States and citizenship in a country built, in part, on the dispossession of Native peoples from their homelands.
That realization has never left me. It remains one of the defining conflicts of my identity as both a Potawatomi citizen and an American.
As others across this country celebrate the birth of the United States 250 years ago, I choose to celebrate something else: the resilience of Native Americans.
For 250 years, Native people have endured the loss of land, broken treaties, forced removals, boarding schools, termination policies, and countless efforts to erase our cultures and identities. Yet we are still here. Our nations still govern. Our languages are being revitalized. Our ceremonies continue. Our children are learning who they are.
The American story is often told as a story of independence. Native people know it is also a story of survival. As the nation marks its anniversary, I celebrate the strength, perseverance, and resilience of Indigenous peoples who have overcome so much and continue to shape the future of this land.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen – We are all related.
