Independence
Yesterday, the Fourth of July, I saw the following two posts on r/IndianCountry:
I had never heard of the Haudenosaunee Confederation. I read part of the Wikipedia link on The Great Law of Peace someone posted in the comments, then decided to cross post it to one of my subs (r/TheCrescent) to be able to find it later.
I didn't want to use the original title because it's a title by a Native American speaking to other Native Americans. I went through comments, decided to title it more neutrally as Haudenosaunee Confederation and copied and pasted that phrase to make sure I didn't misspell it.
I don't even know how that is pronounced and I imagine a lot of people who are not members of that tribe don't know how that is pronounced. Most likely, this helps keep people defaulting to calling them Iroquois because it's shorter, it's familiar, it's from French -- thus a lot more people can spell it and pronounce it -- and don't need to worry about some Native who is hot to trot to find you offensive getting on your case about your spelling or pronunciation.
So rather than risk personal confrontation and personal discomfort, we routinely engage in a greater form of disrespect, a deeper kind of cultural erasure, and continue calling them Iroquois, a name outsiders gave them who didn't understand their language. I read somewhere on Reddit that it's French for "Those people who keep saying ira," I guess kind of like how the main character in The Thirteenth Warrior gets called Evan by the Vikings due to the many iterations of "ibn" in his long Arabic name.
The Confederation is described as a still living democracy and the Wikipedia article documents that some historians suggest the founding fathers of the US borrowed ideas from it. I actually think that makes more sense than the standard narrative that these were unique incredible idealistic geniuses who just birthed a new concept of government whole cloth.
I saw Rebecca Nagle's comments later. I used to follow her on Twitter back when it was Twitter. Her comments are cross posted from Blue Sky, a Twitter alternative, which makes me suspect she probably left Twitter after it became Elon Musk's personal platform for White Supremacist garbage.
My recollection is she's a civil rights lawyer and Native American political activist. She posits that the real goal of the Declaration of Independence was to take over more land from Native tribes.
That seems unlikely to me. It's someone hurt acting like "You must have had hurting me as your highest goal because it hurts so much" and the reality is people are frequently badly hurt by others who don't actually care about you at all and see you as insignificant and casually stomp you into the ground in the course of reaching for something more important in their eyes.
The complaint in the Declaration talking about "the Savages" is one of a long list of complaints. I seriously doubt that was the primary reason -- "the REAL reason " -- the Colonies went to war with the British Empire which was the most powerful entity on Earth at that time and continues to be a quietly larger force than is typically recognized currently while silly Americans call the US president "The most powerful man in the world" when describing the cat fight between President Trump and Elon Musk AKA "The world's richest man" and those are probably both delusional titles for reasons outside the scope of this piece.
She's also entirely wrong about Americans not knowing about the explicit agenda to take the land from the tribal peoples occupying it. It's called Manifest Destiny and we are all taught all about it starting in elementary school as evidence of how visionary our founding fathers were with not one word said about what callous genocidal assholes they were.
She's a lawyer, so I imagine she's looking for a legal precedent as a thread to pull for arguing her case. But it's in the past and doesn't really matter, even though it still hurts.
We are all victims of a past we were born of and played no part in making. We all inherited an incredibly shitty world filled to the gills with injustice.But whatever "my ancestors" supposedly did to "your ancestors" for theoretically purely evil reasons, I'm not going to roll over and die so you can kick more than 300 million people off "your lands" and maybe if you want a better FUTURE you can start wrapping your brain around the fact that a lot of "you" are part White and a lot of "us" are part Native and this whole thing STINKS but trying to figure out which one of us somehow DESERVES to be shipped someplace else we've never lived that doesn't want us either isn't a constructive path forward.
Whatever happened in the past to get us HERE, a better future for Native Americans is not likely to be born of whining and crying that "This should have never been done to us." Most Americans already agree that it was morally wrong to do that to "YOU people."
But then "YOU people" whine and cry about Blood Quantum rules imposed by the US Federal government while continuing to follow those rules as if you are their bitch and not still sovereign nations in your own right with the power to decide for yourself whom to include as members.
And "YOU people" actively piss all over people like me for having too little Native blood, being too White and thus "not one of you" and actively alienate potential allies because you want to act like hurt little five year olds crying to some adult about your PAIN and don't want to act like grown assed adults making decisions about your lives and your land and your sovereignty and your future.
The single biggest thing standing between you and a better future is YOU.
The second biggest is a problem you are actively growing and entrenching with this bullshit: The many millions of people you want to kick off your lands who have no place else to go if you succeed, so they have no reason to support your goals and every reason to oppose your goals.
And "US people" can easily and lazily oppose your goals by agreeing with the current status quo and doing NOTHING.