‘Merciless Indian savages’: How the Declaration of Independence portrayed Indigenous Americans

Few Americans realize that the Declaration of Independence - oft-celebrated for its soaring ideas about liberty, equality and self-government - also includes disparaging remarks about Native Americans, which it describes as "merciless Indian savages."

In their 1776 grievances against King George III of England, the declaration drafters cast the Indigenous population as a threat to the emerging United States, even as Native peoples were fighting to defend their own lands and sovereignty.

As the U.S. commemorates the 250th anniversary of the declaration on July 4, that little-known passage has prompted scholars to revisit a question that has been overlooked in the nation's founding narrative: What did the birth of the United States mean for the hundreds of Native tribes that already existed across North America?

The question was at the heart of a recent conversation hosted by UCLA School of Law's Native Nations Law and Policy Center, where legal scholars and historians explored the relationship between Native nations, the Declaration of Independence and the nation's founding.

Angela Riley, director of the center, is a professor of law and American Indian studies and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. For her, the nation's semiquincentennial offers an opportunity to tell a fuller story about America's origins.

"Most Americans I meet don't know that the phrase 'merciless Indian savages' was included in the Declaration of Independence," she said. "And if they do, they certainly don't know what its practical import was. I think this ties into a larger story of the erasure of Native nations and the role that Native nations played in the formation of the country."

That story begins with recognizing that the American Revolution unfolded on a continent already shaped by centuries of interaction among Indigenous nations and European powers, said Gregory Ablavsky, a professor at the law school at Stanford University. By 1776, Native nations were not peripheral to the nation's founding but central political actors, defending their homelands, forging alliances and asserting their own sovereignty.

"The key thing to remember is that 1776 ... feels like a long time ago for us, and we're marking the beginning of something. But for people in 1776, the European colonization of North America had been going on for almost as long," he said.

Native leaders would later seize on the declaration's own language describing the colonies as "free and independent" to argue that their nations were equally entitled to sovereignty, Ablavsky noted. That paradox remains one of the central, and often least understood, legacies of the nation's founding.

"America 250 is in some ways a story about celebrating the creation of the United States," he said. "The problem is that the loss that Native peoples experienced in some ways is because of the creation of the United States. In other words, it's the idea that there is a sovereignty they are part of that they didn't really consent to. That is the challenge. And I'm not sure that we have really thought carefully about that in thinking about this history."

For Matthew L.M. Fletcher, a professor at the University of Michigan's law school, those questions remain far more than historical. He argued that Indigenous concepts of governance differed fundamentally from European ideas of sovereignty and continue to shape tribal governments today.

"The tribes that are asserting sovereignty now aren't doing it because we're going to go to war," he said. "We're doing it because ... we actually are governing better than the so-called superior sovereigns around us."

Rather than viewing the nation's 250th anniversary as a simple celebration or condemnation of the past, the scholars encouraged Americans to use the milestone to deepen their understanding of the country's origins, recognizing Native nations not as footnotes to the American story but as sovereign governments whose histories, perspectives and continuing contributions remain essential to understanding the United States.

"Our past doesn't have to be our future," Ablavsky said. "Instead, America's history should serve as a guide for understanding the present, not a constraint on what the country can become."