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Every Fourth of July, the Declaration of Independence is the cornerstone of the U.S.’s celebrations. It’s read aloud in radio, television, and public celebrations. But it carries a contradiction expressed through a slur that Native people have never been able to ignore — a scathing reference to “merciless Indian Savages.” Even as the framers promised a nation of equality and liberty for all, they also made it clear that Indigenous people are not included in their notion of “all.” So, within Native communities, the yearly invocations of the Declaration Independence are also a reminder of how long we have been struggling to resist, survive, and defeat every effort to silence, erase, and eradicate us.

While most public readings of the Declaration of Independence include the full passage, others read around its anti-Indigenous slur or omit that line entirely. The omission says just as much as the words themselves. The U.S. wants the Declaration’s promises without its confession, its dreams of liberty without regard for the people it dehumanized and oppressed, and its proclamation of independence without any acknowledgment of the crimes against humanity that made it possible for the U.S. to exist.

The commemoration of this country’s founding every July 4 asks the public to celebrate a United States that begins with the myth of a nation born of nothing but courage and liberty, on lands not yet tamed or developed. Native people know another beginning. Our nations were already here, with governments, laws, languages, and infrastructure.

The United States is only the latest nation to exist on these lands. As it celebrates 250 years of “independence,” it still has not rescinded or made an effort to correct the violence and policies that followed from the framing of Native people as “merciless Indian Savages.” Instead, it has expanded the strategy of using dehumanizing language against migrants, trans people, anti-fascists, and other targeted communities in an effort to reframe their resistance as “antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”

“Merciless Indian Savages”

The phrase “merciless Indian Savages” isn’t just an unfortunate remnant of a different time; it was an intentional and strategic political move that set a precedent for anti-Native ideology and policies that persist today.

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Historian and member of the Yamasee Nation Donald Grinde Jr. described the phrase as political rhetoric used to justify frontier wars and the taking of Native land. The phrase collapsed hundreds of Native nations into a new enemy and stripped them of their humanity. If Natives were “merciless savages,” their resistance could be framed as aggression, and colonial violence could then be positioned as self-defense, maintaining the optics of innocence and exceptionalism as the newly formed republic looked to build its empire.

“Merciless Indian Savages.” These three words set into motion centuries of brutal anti-Native policy from the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to........

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