„I actually really believe that the reason authoritarianism is rising in the United States,“ says Rebecca Nagle, „and the reason it’s been so hard for people to fight it — is because there’s been a part of the U.S. government that’s always been authoritarian. It’s always been ruled by force and not by consent. And we haven’t actually ever addressed that. We’ve just allowed it to fester for two and a half centuries.“
Nagle is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and one of the sharpest journalistic voices working in the US right now. In her new podcast First America she argues that you can’t actually understand America’s present without understanding the parts of its founding it would rather forget. That might not be a message patriotric Americans want to hear on the date of their semiquincentennial celebrations. But it is a tough lesson that the US public should swallow if it is to move forward as a more healthy, less divided society, she argues.
„If we want to celebrate the United States and we want to celebrate the founding of the United States, we should celebrate the truth, we should celebrate all of it, you know, instead of just regurgitating these half-truths and these myths about our founding. I don’t think it is beneficial for us as a country.“
A Darker Line in the Declaration
Every American schoolchild can recite the opening of the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal, endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These Enlightenment phrases are the soft-power punches in the American Dream. Far fewer have read what comes after — a long list of grievances against King George III, the actual meat of the document, the reasons the founders gave for rebelling in the first place.
„We’ve been told the story that the founders rebelled against England because of taxation and representation,“ Nagle told me. „But according to them, in their own words, the thing that they were most upset about was Indian affairs.“
Buried near the end of that list of grievances is a line describing Native nations as „merciless Indian Savages“. Historians who study the document’s structure believe grievances were often ordered by intensity — meaning that phrase, tucked in near the close, may represent something close to the founders’ most animating fury. Britain had tried to cap westward expansion at the Appalachian Mountains, unwilling to bankroll more colonial wars against Indigenous nations. Colonists wanted that land anyway.
„Right there next to those Enlightenment ideals,“ Nagle says, „is our founders’ deep-seated hatred and animus towards Indigenous people.“
Wearing the Mask While Fighting the Face
There’s a contradiction sitting at the heart of that founding moment — one Nagle has spent a lot of time untangling. At the very time colonial leaders were branding Native people as savages in their founding document, they were also, obsessively, dressing up as them. The men who threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773 did so in Native disguise. Early political cartoons and imagery leaned constantly on Indigenous symbolism. A new nation, freshly cut loose from Britain, needed an identity. So they borrowed one, wholesale, from the people it was simultaneously trying to erase.
It’s a pattern Nagle argues never really went away. Centuries later, it shows up in sports mascots, in dreamcatchers hanging from rearview mirrors, in the sudden popularity of sage bundles at health food stores — an America that has, generation after generation, found it easier to romanticize an imagined, frozen-in-time version of Native culture than to reckon with, or even really see, living Native communities. The costume gets celebrated. The people wearing it, or objecting to how it’s worn, do not.
Fort Snelling, Twice
Nagle’s argument isn’t really about the 1700s at all — it’s about how the mechanics built then are still running today. She offered me a story to explain what she means.
Earlier this year, she was reporting at Fort Snelling, on the outskirts of Minneapolis — a site that, in the 1860s, served as a detention camp for Dakota people following the U.S.–Dakota War. While she was there, she learned that an ICE agent had just shot and killed Renée Good, an American citizen, nearby. The next day, Nagle was back at Fort Snelling again. This time she was there for a protest, because the regional ICE headquarters now sits on that same historic ground. It remains federal land today for the same reason it was federal land in the 1860s: it was once a military installation.
For Nagle, that overlap of geography wasn’t incidental. „These things that are happening in the United States right now, that people are saying is unprecedented and un-American,“ she told me, „they’re all things that our government has actually done before. They’ve just done it to people that we don’t talk about — parts of our history that we don’t know.“
It’s a thread she traces further still: legal doctrines first developed to govern Native nations, she argues, were later adapted into the frameworks that determine how the U.S. treats immigrants and non-citizens today; including why they often lack the same access to due process as citizens.
A Quiet Family Wedding
So how does a woman who has spent years documenting all of this actually spend the Fourth of July?
Quietly, it turns out. Nagle told me she won’t be marking Independence Day with fireworks or flags this year — instead, she’ll be at a family wedding, a happy, ordinary day that has nothing to do with the anniversary at all. It’s not, she’s keen to stress, an act of protest. „It’s not about raining on people’s parade,“ she said. What she wants, more than anything, is simply for the country to tell itself the truth about how it began, including the grievances, contradictions and land hunger. That would be healthier than the tidier version served up at parades.
Because, as Nagle sees it, the story of how America was founded isn’t ancient history sealed off behind glass. It’s a set of instructions the country is, in many ways, still following.