What to the Native American is the Fourth of July?

“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.“

According to the Declaration of Independence, the above is the worst of the “history of repeated injuries and usurpations” by King George III against the colonies. This was quite the “today I learned” for me from the first episode of First America, a podcast by Rebecca Nagle.

In the same podcast I also learned that the reason King George III tried to make peace with the alliance of tribes that fought back against them so soon after they’d defeated the French is that Great Britain was broke from how expensive war is. Colonists felt entitled to the land the king had given back—not just people like George Washington (who made some of his fortune through land speculation), but those too poor to own land and lived as squatters on tribal lands instead.

I’ll be very interested to see where Nagle takes the rest of this podcast. The first episode also drew some parallels to the present, specifically the activities of ICE in Minnesota. But it’s already changed how I’ll think about the Declaration of Independence and America’s founding from now on.