AMY GOODMAN: Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence Saturday, July Fourth, we turn to the people in history most often left out of the nation’s founding story. Award-winning Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle has partnered with leading Indigenous scholars in a new documentary podcast series called First America. It challenges the conventional U.S. origin story by examining the experiences of Indigenous peoples and also asks what those experiences can teach us about U.S. democracy today. The series also traces how legal doctrines first used to dispossess Indigenous nations continue to impact questions of executive power, immigration, xenophobia, citizenship, territorial expansion and U.S. foreign policy today. This is a clip from episode one, “Merciless Indian Savages.”

REBECCA NAGLE: We’ve been told the American Revolution was fought over taxes and representation. But the last complaint, the thing our founders were most angry about, goes like this:

REVOLUTIONARY WAR REENACTOR 1: He has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages.

REBECCA NAGLE: There’s a racial slur in the Declaration of Independence. Native people are called “savages.” Alongside those lofty ideals, our founders included their deep hatred for Indigenous people.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR REENACTOR 1: The merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

REBECCA NAGLE: In case you need a refresher, the popular story of the American Revolution goes like this. Britain unjustly imposed taxes on the colonists, and they got mad. But every time they protested, like when they threw tea into the Boston Harbor, the king just imposed harsher laws.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR REENACTOR 2: The tea crisis was a spark that united a people toward a revolution.

REBECCA NAGLE: The colonists started to see their king as a tyrant.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR REENACTOR 3: Four thousand troops are now stationed here within our city.

REBECCA NAGLE: Some started talking about independence.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR REENACTOR 2: United under one Continental Congress.

REBECCA NAGLE: Late one night, Paul Revere rode his horse to warn militias waiting outside Boston that the British were coming. The next morning, the militia squared off against the Brits.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR REENACTOR 3: Shot heard ’round the world was fired.

REBECCA NAGLE: And the Revolutionary War began.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR REENACTOR 3: America began her fight for independence.

REBECCA NAGLE: A year later, our Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia to write the Declaration of Independence. But for two-and-a-half centuries, that document has been telling a different story.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from episode one of the new podcast series from Pushkin Industries, First America, host and executive producer, award-winning Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle, who’s joining us now from Tulsa, Oklahoma, also author of By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land.

Rebecca, congratulations on this series. If you can start off by telling us this story about the Declaration of Independence and, as you talk about, the racist slur it contains?

REBECCA NAGLE: Absolutely. So, the part of the Declaration of Independence that we all know is the beginning part with those Enlightenment ideals, “all men are created equal.” But when you read the document, actually, most of it is this list of grievances. So, it’s our founders kind of listing the reasons why they want to rebel against England. It’s all the ways that King George III has hurt the colonists.

And a lot of historians think that that list has an order, that it starts with smaller things and that it ends with their biggest complaints, their biggest grievances. And the last grievance in the Declaration of Independence is about “merciless Indian savages.” And so, when you read the document, you know, according to our founders, in their own words, the thing that they were most angry about was Native people. Yet for two-and-a-half centuries, the story of the American Revolution that we have all been told is that it was about taxation and representation. And we’re, frankly, just missing the truth of why the American Revolution even happened in the first place.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Rebecca, back in 2011, I did a history of the American press, and one of the things that struck me in the research in my book, for News for All the People, was the extraordinary level of content about Native Americans in the colonial press. I mean, the first newspaper in North America, Benjamin Harris’s Publick Occurrences, had five separate articles, in a three-page newspaper, on what he called the “barbarous Indians” and “merciless savages,” that were, according to him, lurking around the Massachusetts colony. And in fact, in the Boston Tea Party, the Sons of Liberty, who donned Native garb, did it out of the headquarters of the local newspaper, the Boston Gazette, before they went in to dump the tea in the harbor. So there’s always been this narrative issue of the American press and Native Americans during that colonial period. I’m wondering your thoughts about the role of the press in creating this narrative.

REBECCA NAGLE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that it’s funny, because when you go back in time and you look at primary documents, it’s very clear that Native people were omnipresent in the colonists’ lives. They were talking about it. I think you could even say they were obsessed with Native people. And then, the way that subsequent generations have told that story, we’re erased.

But I’m glad that you bring up the Boston Tea Party, because that’s a great example. So, when colonists stormed ships to throw tea into the Boston Harbor, they actually — they dressed up like Native people. And it wasn’t for disguise. It wasn’t to confuse British officials. It was actually because pretending to be Indigenous in this weird and complicated way symbolized freedom and liberty in the early republic. And so, as Americans were kind of, you know, saying, “We’re not British. We’re no longer English, but we’re not yet American,” they actually, in certain ways, pretended to be Indigenous or took on parts of Indigenous identity to figure out a new national identity. But when we think about what does it mean to be American, we actually don’t tell the full story of how early Americans were figuring that out. And so, yeah, I think your point is absolutely right, in that when we look back on the history, we’re not — we’re not telling the Native part of the story, but Americans at that time very much were.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip from your first episode of First America, where, Rebecca, you visit a protest in the aftermath of the ICE killing of Renee Good. In this clip, you ask protesters if they know the history of Fort Snelling and its current connection with ICE.

REBECCA NAGLE: How far are we from the historic Fort Snelling?

PROTESTER 1: Just right across Highway 62 here.

REBECCA NAGLE: And do you know what happened there?

PROTESTER 2: Oh, now, no, don’t ask me those kinds of questions. I’m not good with history. It’s a historic fort. It’s historic.

REBECCA NAGLE: Yeah. I’m sorry to put you on the spot.

PROTESTER 2: I mean, the reason this is all happening here is because of the ICE offices that are there, not because of the historic fort, but…

REBECCA NAGLE: Yeah. Well, the fort in the 1860s was actually a concentration camp for Dakota people.

PROTESTER 2: Oh.

REBECCA NAGLE: I’m just curious if any of that history feels relevant to what’s happening now.

PROTESTER 2: Yes, clearly, you know. But, I mean, our state, I mean, just I — yeah, I mean, what’s — I mean, you watched that video. Thank God that person was there taking the video on their cellphone yesterday, so everyone can see what happened, you know.

REBECCA NAGLE: After leaving the protest, I went back to see Nick Estes at his office.

NICK ESTES: The murder of Renee Good and the history of Fort Snelling are actually inseparable. First of all, ICE is headquartered on the Fort Snelling area campus.

REBECCA NAGLE: Do you know if that’s because it’s federal land?

NICK ESTES: Yeah, it’s headquartered there because it’s federal land.

REBECCA NAGLE: And why is it federal land?

NICK ESTES: It’s federal land because it was once a military reservation from the Zebulon Pike Treaty of 1805. And that was a treaty signed between some Dakota leaders and the United States government to create a military outpost.

REBECCA NAGLE: It’s not just the same place. The same thing is happening.

NICK ESTES: People are being hunted in their neighborhoods, in their schools. Places that were considered sanctuary sites, such as hospitals and churches, are no longer off-limits. A hundred fifty years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us. And now they’re hunting down immigrants to deport them.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s University of Minnesota Native American professor Nick Estes, one of the people you talked to in this series, Rebecca Nagle. Talk about why you feel it’s so important. In listening to the episodes of this remarkable series, you’re continually going back in time and showing the treatment of Native Americans is a precursor and should have been a warning to, should have been dealt with, so that what’s happening today wouldn’t be happening.

REBECCA NAGLE: You know, Amy, it was a really interesting experience making this podcast, because when I first set out, I thought I was making a history podcast. You know, I interviewed historians like Nick Estes. I read books. I visited historic sites. Nick and I actually were at Fort Snelling the day that ICE shot and killed Renee Good, and it was just a coincidence. And so, what would happen is I would be reporting on America’s past, and then the same thing would happen in our present.

And what I heard a lot during the ICE surge in Minneapolis was “This is un-American. This is un-American. This is unprecedented.” And actually, you know, rounding people up, putting people in detention, even shooting anybody who gets in the way, these are things that our government has done before — not once, not twice, but many, many times. We’ve just — our government has just done it to people that we don’t talk about. It’s just this part of our history that, as a country, we’ve never dealt with.

And I think that — I think that most Americans see that what our government did to Native people was bad. You know, I think most Americans would agree — a lot of people agree that our government committed genocide. I think even people who wouldn’t go that far would say that, you know, atrocities were committed. But I think the problem is, is that people don’t see that as affecting their lives, right? It’s a distant chapter. You know, it’s really unfortunate that in the 1860s the federal government had a concentration camp for Dakota people at Fort Snelling, but what does that have to do with our present moment? Right? And the government that did those things — right? — that rounded people up, that made concentration camps, that’s still our government, right? We never went back and had that edit to say, “OK, we have to make sure that that never happens again. Here are the things that we’re going to change.”

And what we’re seeing in this moment isn’t new, isn’t un-American, isn’t unprecedented, but is these aspects of our government that we thought would stay at the margins — right? — that would only affect certain people, getting pulled to the center. And so, I kind of think of it as what our government did to Native people almost like setting up fault lines in American government and American democracy, and what we’re living through in our current moment is the earthquake.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this relationship that you try to bring out, not only in terms of the ideals of democracy, but also the quest for empire and land in American history?

REBECCA NAGLE: Yeah. And so, one of the biggest myths — I would say the biggest myth — about the founding of the United States is that our founders built a democracy. Right? That’s the story even on the left. That’s the story that we want to tell. And that’s only half-true, because they also built an empire.

So, actually, the same summer that our founders are writing the Constitution, Congress meets in New York, so people actually leave the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to pass this law in New York called the Northwest Ordinance. And it establishes the first colonies of the United States, which are places like Ohio. We don’t think of Ohio as having been a colony, but it was a colony. And those places weren’t governed through democracy. There weren’t elections, even for the white people living there. It was all through top-down appointed leadership. And so, that’s how the U.S. governed Native people when it wanted to take our lands. It’s how it’s governed places like Guam and Puerto Rico.

And so, there has always, since the founding — since the founding, there has always been a part of our government that was not following the blueprint of democracy, that was following the blueprint of empire. And you know what it looks like. It looks like authoritarianism. Right? Because when you’re controlling people’s lives, when they don’t have any say, when they don’t have accountability, when you’re governing top down, I mean, that’s what we call authoritarianism.

And so, this idea — the political moment that we’re in right now, so many people are searching: Where did this rise of authoritarianism come from? How is it happening in the United States? People are looking abroad, you know, so people are looking to Putin’s Russia or Hungary or even Nazi Germany. And we only have to look into our own history. And actually, the reason that this is happening now is because we have let that part of our government fester. And we thought that it would always stay separate, right? We thought that it wouldn’t infect American democracy, that we could be an empire and that we could be a democracy, you know, and that they would stay separate, that never the two shall meet. And that’s just not how government works.

And so, you know, from birthright citizenship to bombing boats in the Caribbean, to going to war with Iran, to, you know, detaining migrant families, to deploying the National Guard to U.S. cities — all of these things that the Trump administration is doing — its power to do those things actually goes back to policies we first passed to dispossess Indigenous people.

AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca Nagle, we’re going to end with the trailer to your First America podcast series.

REBECCA NAGLE: Are you guys big Chiefs fans?

CHIEFS FAN 1: Hell, yeah! Yes.

REBECCA NAGLE: This past year, I’ve been out traveling the country — 

CHIEFS FAN 2: “Chiefs” on three. One, two, three!

CHIEFS FANS: Chiefs!

REBECCA NAGLE: — to try to understand something about America.

CHIEFS FANS: [“war chanting”]

REBECCA NAGLE: I feel like that’s going to happen a lot.

About where Native people fit in.

Do you know who Native Americans are?

GIRL: Yes. They are the people, the — they are the first people to live here.

REBECCA NAGLE: Do Native Americans still exist?

GIRL: Maybe. I don’t really think so.

REBECCA NAGLE: And the history we’ve pushed aside.

Do you think most people who come to this spot — do you think that they come here to honor the atrocity that happened here?

NICK ESTES: No, they’re doing winter sports.

REBECCA NAGLE: Going all the way back to how the United States began.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR REENACTOR: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

NED BLACKHAWK: The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered sentences and paragraphs about Enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR REENACTOR: The merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages…

NED BLACKHAWK: If we don’t understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won’t understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

REBECCA NAGLE: So, it’s been 250 years since 1776. How’s this democracy of ours going?

Uh-oh. OK, I need to merge. I’m going to — 

NICK ESTES: Hold on. My wife called me. Somebody got shot. Damn, the photos are really bad.

PROTESTERS: Renee Nicole Good! Renee Nicole Good! ICE, go home! ICE, go home!

REBECCA NAGLE: We’ve seen the military deployed to U.S. cities, invasions of foreign countries, billionaires out of control and a president with unchecked power. I keep hearing people say, “This isn’t who we are as a country.”

REP. DAVE MIN: What is happening right now in America is fundamentally un-American.

UNIDENTIFIED: Fundamentally un-American.

SKIP: This is just so un-American.

REBECCA NAGLE: But what I’ve learned the past year is that U.S. history tells a different story.

NICK ESTES: A hundred fifty years ago, they were collecting bounties on us and hunting us down to kill us. And now they’re hunting down immigrants to deport them.

MAGGIE BLACKHAWK: Is that a new thing? This is what we’ve done. We’re good at this.

REBECCA NAGLE: As we see more and more signs of fascism, people keep looking to other countries to understand it. But it’s right here in our own history. I don’t believe we would have ended up in the same spot if people had realized what the structure of the United States government is. I want us to know how we got here, because, otherwise, we will never find our way out.

AMY GOODMAN: Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle just launched a new documentary podcast series called First America, the true story of the founding of the United States.

Coming up, as democratic socialists score big wins across the United States, we’ll be joined by one of those winners, a New York City democratic socialist, Aber Kawas, the Democratic nominee for the New York state Senate from Queens. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Snake Hoop” by Mariee Siou.