The American Revolution wasn&rsquo;t just a fight for liberty. It was also a sprawling conflict with Indigenous nations over who would control the continent of North America. And to stake out their claim, the United States was willing to commit genocide. Rebecca talks to Maggie Blackhawk (Ojibwe) about how our country&rsquo;s early treatment of Native Americans is the root of authoritarianism in the United States. Resources: - Jeffrey Ostler, "<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.72.4.0587?seq=1&amp;cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents%20%20-%20Cherokee%20Tragedy:%20The%20Ridge%20Family%20and%20the%20Decimation%20of%20a%20People,">&ldquo;To Extirpate the Indians&rdquo;: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s&ndash;1810</a>," The William and Mary Quarterly, by Thurman Wilkins - Rhiannon Koehler "<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328753755_Hostile_Nations_Quantifying_the_Destruction_of_the_Sullivan-Clinton_Genocide_of_1779">Hostile Nations: Quantifying the Destruction of the Sullivan-Clinton Genocide of 1779</a>," American Indian Quarterly, 2018See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Native people have been written out of the American story, but without us you don&rsquo;t know what happened. This summer the United States will celebrate the 250-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. When you read the Declaration, you realize it is a list of complaints. The last entry, the climax in our founders&rsquo; reasons for rebellion against the Crown, is this: &ldquo;He has excited&hellip; the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.&rdquo;
We have been told the Revolution was fought over taxation and representation. But what the founders were most angry about in our country&rsquo;s most famous document was Indian affairs. How did generations of Americans miss this?
The first armed rebellion against the Crown was an attack on British forts that traded with tribes. When colonists threw tea into the Boston harbor, they dressed up like members of the Mohawk tribe&mdash;not for disguise, but because pretending to be Indian symbolized freedom and rebellion. The founding fathers&rsquo; first government failed because Indigenous nations were too powerful; war and diplomacy with Native people is why we have a central federal government.
Hosted and reported by Rebecca Nagle and&nbsp; featuring leading Native historians,&nbsp; First America unveils&nbsp; how the founders&rsquo; treatment of Indigenous nations&mdash;and their resistance&mdash;shaped US democracy. The show&nbsp; does not simply add another blemish to the image of the founding fathers, it reveals the real story of why the colonists rebelled, what kind of government they created, and, crucially, how our current political moment was 250 years in the making.