Email
The People the Declaration Called ‘Savages’ Were Mostly Ignored in the Celebration 250 Years Later
| From | FAIR <[email protected]> |
| Subject | The People the Declaration Called ‘Savages’ Were Mostly Ignored in the Celebration 250 Years Later |
| Date | July 13, 2026 9:33 PM |
Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
[link removed]
FAIR
View article on FAIR's website ([link removed])
The People the Declaration Called ‘Savages’ Were Mostly Ignored in the Celebration 250 Years Later Drew Favakeh ([link removed])
Truthout: The Anti-Indigenous Slur in the Declaration of Independence Speaks Volumes
Johnnie Jae (Truthout, 7/4/26 ([link removed]) ) : "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.'"
At the 250th anniversary of the United States, it’s worth returning to the 27th and final complaint the Declaration of Independence ([link removed]) makes against King George III:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 prohibited western expansion past the Appalachian Mountains, a major contribution to the Revolutionary War. The Declaration of Independence announced not just freedom from Britain, but freedom to advance further upon Native land and continue to kill and otherwise remove ([link removed]) its longtime inhabitants.
The founding of the country, and its Declaration of Independence, cannot then be separated ([link removed]) from the 96% decrease ([link removed]) in the Native American population, from 5 million people in 1492 to 237,000 in 1900. Nor can its conceptions of liberty and rights be separated from the freedoms stolen from Native Americans, first in their right to their lives and their land, and later in their right to their culture and religion.
In 1887, the US government divided ([link removed]) tribal land into privately owned plots and auctioned off the remaining land to non-Indigenous US citizens, which resulted in the seizure of more than 90 million acres of Native American land.
The US government forcibly abducted Native American children and sent them to boarding schools ([link removed]) hundreds of miles away, where they were starved and beaten when they spoke their Native languages. From the 1940s through the late 1960s, the US government enacted Indian termination policies ([link removed]) that were intended ([link removed]) to force Native Americans to assimilate into US society.
And yet Native Americans were largely absent from US corporate media opinion pieces about America’s semiquincentennial.
I found 79 opinion articles about the 250th anniversary published between May 30 and July 4 in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today. Only three explicitly mentioned “Native American,” “Indian” or “Indigenous”; another referenced the genocide without using those terms. None gave Native Americans more than a line or two.
** ‘Looked like a blank slate’
------------------------------------------------------------
NYT: It's America's Birthday. What Are We Celebrating?
The New York Times (6/25/26 ([link removed]) ) encouraged its opinion writers to put on a happy face for the US's 250th anniversary.
In a collection headlined “It’s America’s Birthday. What Are We Celebrating?” the New York Times (6/25/26 ([link removed]) ) asked 16 opinion columnists and writers to “pluck a moment from this complicated history that represents the best of what this country can be.”
It’s an assignment that encourages writers to look past the shameful parts of our country’s history rather than reckon with them. Yet there were points at which that omission was still glaring.
Columnist Nicholas Kristof ([link removed]) ’s contribution—headlined “Our Public Lands”—celebrated how the first head of the US Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, and President Theodore Roosevelt “set aside roughly 230 million acres as national forests and other public preserves.”
Kristof did not acknowledge that this preservation involved “Roosevelt continu[ing] his predecessors’ push to remove Native Americans from their ancestral territories,” as History.com (5/11/22 ([link removed]) ) noted. Much of the 86 million acres of tribal land transferred to the National Forest system happened during Roosevelt’s tenure, which reflected Roosevelt’s racial biases.
The Times’ David French ([link removed]) , meanwhile, argued that “if you wanted to introduce people to the highest American ideals,” he would point them to “the great documents of the American founding.”
French added that “the founders were beginning from something that looked like a blank slate, trying—as much as they could within their context—to imagine what a nation could be.”
But the nation was far from a “blank slate”: The first inhabitants migrated from Siberia to America anywhere from 14,400 ([link removed]) to 29,000 ([link removed]) years before Christopher Columbus mistakenly landed in the Caribbean.
And those inhabitants had an impact on the “great documents.” The framers of the Constitution “are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles and governmental practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy,” as the Senate recognized in a 1987 resolution ([link removed]) .
The final piece in the collection was the only one to acknowledge the US genocide of Native Americans within the optimism-seeking editorial assignment. The Times’ Lydia Polgreen ([link removed]) wrote that the country’s “romance with space” was “a byproduct of America’s restless search for new terrain.” Before the 1986 Challenger disaster, space
was a wide-open zone of exploration and discovery, untainted by the bloody, genocidal rampages that characterized the westward expansion of the physical frontier.
That the space program has continued, she argued, shows a capacity to “reckon with failure, to live with grief…and forge ahead” that she hopes could be brought “home, to this land.”
** ‘Chapters that deserve criticism’
------------------------------------------------------------
USA Today: Are you going to celebrate the 250th? Here's why you should.
USA Today (6/23/26 ([link removed]) ) invited people to celebrate under the banner of "250 Years of Freedom"—including people who were denied the right to vote for most of those 250 years.
Many of the pieces across the outlets made nods toward the grimmer parts of the founding of the country, but refused to name the treatment of Native Americans. In a piece published on July 4 ([link removed]) , the New York Times editorial board wrote:
At its best, this country has been a friend to the cause of human freedom. The ledger is not clean, but any fair accounting shows a nation that has turned its enormous strength toward the good far more often than not.
The Times vaguely added that the US’s founding was “a revolutionary moral claim issued by imperfect people who did not fully live up to it.” It noted that the “nation’s early fights were mostly over which people would be granted life and liberty.”
USA Today published an opinion article (6/23/26 ([link removed]) ) by public relations specialist Mike Carpenter that pushed back against those who are “not in a partying mood” under Trump. Though the subhead noted that “as a nation, we survived the darkest days in our history and became better as a result,” and the article listed many examples of such supposedly past days, the genocide of Native Americans was not among them.
USA Today’s libertarian-conservative columnist Ingrid Jacques ([link removed]) (7/1/26 ([link removed]) ) insisted that “all Americans should read the Declaration of Independence,” because
an alarming number of Americans have lost touch with our founding in 1776 and the principles of freedom and liberty our Founding Fathers laid out in the declaration.
Jacques had nothing to say about what we should learn from that d0cuments’ prominent slur against Native Americans, or how to reconcile the idea that a nation guided by principles of “freedom and liberty” exterminated most of its original inhabitants.
** ‘Best reason to celebrate’
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: America's 250th Birthday Matters far Beyond America."
Philippa Stroud complains in the Washington Post (6/23/26 ([link removed]) ) that "students are often taught to view the West primarily through the lens of its failures and injustices." Maybe elite opinion writers didn't go to school?
Conservative USA Today columnist Dace Potas ([link removed]) (6/24/26 ([link removed]) ) wrote that “patriotism has fallen out of fashion for young people because of America's past injustices.” Potas wrote, “That’s backward—the progress we’ve made in overcoming those injustices is the best reason to celebrate this country, not resent it.”
Potas argued that the US “is such a great country in my eyes because it has been able to move past the horrible things that happened here,” including “overcoming slavery, internment camps, Jim Crow.” The US’s mass killing of Native Americans was missing from the list of things we've “move[d] past.”
The Washington Post, meanwhile, published an opinion article (6/23/26 ([link removed]) ) by Philippa Stroud, a Conservative member of the British House of Lords. Stroud asserted that “equality, liberty and the inherent dignity of every person were not inventions of 18th-century America.”
These rights “emerged from a long tradition stretching from Athens and Jerusalem through Rome and Britain before finding political expression in Philadelphia,” she explained.
Stroud argued that "every society must confront its failures honestly." But rather than address the failures of the US to deliver “equality, liberty and the inherent dignity” to every citizen, Stroud claimed that those rights had already been established by slavery-dependent theocracies and monarchies of the Iron Age.
** ‘Founded not on ethnicity’
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: This Fourth, don’t buy the snake oil of the ‘blood and soil’ right
America had no "distinctive ethnicity" in 1776, wrote Marc Thiessen (Washington Post, 7/2/26 ([link removed]) ), because "only 60% of the white population was English." But the people allowed to vote ([link removed]) were distinctly white.
The Washington Post’s Marc A. Thiessen ([link removed]) (7/2/26 ([link removed]) ) explicitly denied that those dark chapters of the country’s founding have any relevance to today’s celebrations. He argued that "our nationalism is a belief in the superiority of the American idea," not "the superiority of a particular race." He made no effort to square this claim with the reality of a country founded with only one particular race able to vote—and whose founding document cites as an example of "absolute tyranny" the king's restrictions on the colonists' ability to steal land ([link removed]) from another race.
A USA Today guest op-ed (6/28/26 ([link removed]) ) by Asan Q. Bui, director of cyberspace and technology at Headquarters Air Force Reserve Command ([link removed]) , similarly argued that the US “is one of the few nations in history founded not on ethnicity, ancestry or bloodline but on a set of principles. Those principles inspired colonists seeking self-government in 1776.”
While it’s true that the US was not founded on an idea of ethnicity that distinguished between English and Irish, Dutch and German, the young country was the crucible in which a new conception of whiteness was forged that enabled the new “melting pot” to unite against those it was stealing land from, as well as those it was stealing labor from.
The US founders granted rights ([link removed]) only to white males; Black men did not have even a theoretical right to vote until after the Civil War, while Native Americans were only given suffrage in 1924. Both groups’ voting rights were routinely ignored ([link removed]) up through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while the struggle against racist voter suppression continues today.
** ‘A cruel picture of Natives’
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: Three words in the Declaration of Independence paint a cruel picture of Natives
This online-only news piece by Dana Hedgpeth (Washington Post, 6/30/26 ([link removed]) ) noted that Declaration's "portrayal of Indigenous people helped establish a moral and legal framework that justified decades of devastating US policies toward Native communities."
One of only three mentions of Native Americans in the papers during the sample period came in passing in a Washington Post article (7/3/26 ([link removed]) ) headlined “This Mistake Helped Transform 22-Year-Old George Washington.” The piece, by former US archivist Colleen Shogan, centered on a young Washington, “who made serious mistakes, with sobering consequences,” and how he developed “leadership qualities” through “experience, the acquisition of knowledge and a willingness to learn from failure.” One of those experiences was a battle during the French and Indian war, when a leading French officer “was slain by one of Washington’s Native American allies ([link removed]) .”
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie ([link removed]) (7/1/26 ([link removed]) ) also made brief mention of Native Americans, though he did so explicitly in the context of their exclusion from the equality promised by the Declaration of Independence. "Women, Natives, landless laborers and, most starkly, Black Americans, both free and enslaved," he explains, understood the document's pronouncement of equality "as a radical statement of principle for the present." This was one line in his broader argument that the Declaration's significance lies not in how the founding fathers envisioned equality, but in how Black Americans, and abolitionists Black and white, wielded that principle to make it more truly universal.
While white writers far outnumber Black writers on the opinion pages at the country's top papers, columns like Bouie's demonstrated the importance of representation on those pages. (See also: Theodore R. Johnson at the Washington Post—7/1/26 ([link removed]) .) FAIR could identify no regular columnist at any of the four papers surveyed as Native American.
Alone among the papers, the Post does have one Native American news reporter: Dana Hedgpeth, an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe of North Carolina. Hedgpeth covers both local breaking news and Native American news for the paper.
Hedgpeth penned a piece for the Post (6/30/26 ([link removed]) ) in the news section headlined "Three Words in the Declaration of Independence Paint a Cruel Picture of Natives." The piece, which appeared online only, interviews Native American scholars and leaders for their thoughts on "the Founding Fathers’ use of the derogatory description for Indigenous people in 1776." It expands on both historical and contemporary experiences of Native Americans, and uniquely centers their voices in its reflections on the 250th anniversary.
** 'We've been here before'
------------------------------------------------------------
WSJ: A Divided Country Celebrates Its Anniversary—Again
The Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley (6/30/26 ([link removed]) ) says it's "unfortunate" that only "“about one-quarter of Americans say the US stands above all other countries in the world.”
Hedgpeth's piece is a much more in-depth exploration than any of the opinion pieces published by any of the papers. In the Wall Street Journal's only mention of Native Americans, a column by Jason L. Riley ([link removed]) (6/30/26 ([link removed]) ) headlined “A Divided Country Celebrates Its Anniversary—Again” argues that the country’s “sour mood” is nothing to worry about, as “we’ve been here before” during previous anniversaries.
In the eighth paragraph, Riley quoted historian Fergus Bordewich as asking in his book Centennial about America’s 100th birthday: “Would Native Americans survive at all, and at what cost to their embattled cultures?” Riley didn’t reflect further upon the country’s treatment of those it stole its land from, eventually concluding:
Though far from perfect, [our framework of governance] has improved over time and become the envy of the world. Remember that as some use this milestone to chronicle the nation’s shortcomings, and others to whitewash the past.
But ignoring, downplaying or dismissing those “shortcomings,” as nearly all of our nation’s prominent pundits have done, leaves us without a clear understanding of our country's history. The US has long supported ([link removed]) foreign governments that commit war crimes and mass atrocities against Indigenous peoples, as it continues to finance Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza. Averting our eyes from the fact that our Declaration of Independence was also a tirade against "merciless Indian Savages" makes it easier to miss the through line.
------------------------------------------------------------
Research assistance: Louise Liu
Read more ([link removed])
Share this post: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Twitter"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Twitter" alt="Twitter" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Facebook"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Facebook" alt="Facebook" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Pinterest"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Pinterest" alt="Pinterest" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="LinkedIn"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="LinkedIn" alt="LinkedIn" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Google Plus"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Google Plus" alt="Google Plus" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Instapaper"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Instapaper" alt="Instapaper" class="mc-share"></a>
© 2021 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you signed up for email alerts from
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Our mailing address is:
FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING
124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201
New York, NY 10001
FAIR's Website ([link removed])
FAIR counts on your support to do this work — please donate today ([link removed]) .
Follow us on Twitter ([link removed]) | Friend us on Facebook ([link removed])
change your preferences ([link removed])
Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp
[link removed]
unsubscribe ([link removed]) .
FAIR
View article on FAIR's website ([link removed])
The People the Declaration Called ‘Savages’ Were Mostly Ignored in the Celebration 250 Years Later Drew Favakeh ([link removed])
Truthout: The Anti-Indigenous Slur in the Declaration of Independence Speaks Volumes
Johnnie Jae (Truthout, 7/4/26 ([link removed]) ) : "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.'"
At the 250th anniversary of the United States, it’s worth returning to the 27th and final complaint the Declaration of Independence ([link removed]) makes against King George III:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 prohibited western expansion past the Appalachian Mountains, a major contribution to the Revolutionary War. The Declaration of Independence announced not just freedom from Britain, but freedom to advance further upon Native land and continue to kill and otherwise remove ([link removed]) its longtime inhabitants.
The founding of the country, and its Declaration of Independence, cannot then be separated ([link removed]) from the 96% decrease ([link removed]) in the Native American population, from 5 million people in 1492 to 237,000 in 1900. Nor can its conceptions of liberty and rights be separated from the freedoms stolen from Native Americans, first in their right to their lives and their land, and later in their right to their culture and religion.
In 1887, the US government divided ([link removed]) tribal land into privately owned plots and auctioned off the remaining land to non-Indigenous US citizens, which resulted in the seizure of more than 90 million acres of Native American land.
The US government forcibly abducted Native American children and sent them to boarding schools ([link removed]) hundreds of miles away, where they were starved and beaten when they spoke their Native languages. From the 1940s through the late 1960s, the US government enacted Indian termination policies ([link removed]) that were intended ([link removed]) to force Native Americans to assimilate into US society.
And yet Native Americans were largely absent from US corporate media opinion pieces about America’s semiquincentennial.
I found 79 opinion articles about the 250th anniversary published between May 30 and July 4 in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today. Only three explicitly mentioned “Native American,” “Indian” or “Indigenous”; another referenced the genocide without using those terms. None gave Native Americans more than a line or two.
** ‘Looked like a blank slate’
------------------------------------------------------------
NYT: It's America's Birthday. What Are We Celebrating?
The New York Times (6/25/26 ([link removed]) ) encouraged its opinion writers to put on a happy face for the US's 250th anniversary.
In a collection headlined “It’s America’s Birthday. What Are We Celebrating?” the New York Times (6/25/26 ([link removed]) ) asked 16 opinion columnists and writers to “pluck a moment from this complicated history that represents the best of what this country can be.”
It’s an assignment that encourages writers to look past the shameful parts of our country’s history rather than reckon with them. Yet there were points at which that omission was still glaring.
Columnist Nicholas Kristof ([link removed]) ’s contribution—headlined “Our Public Lands”—celebrated how the first head of the US Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, and President Theodore Roosevelt “set aside roughly 230 million acres as national forests and other public preserves.”
Kristof did not acknowledge that this preservation involved “Roosevelt continu[ing] his predecessors’ push to remove Native Americans from their ancestral territories,” as History.com (5/11/22 ([link removed]) ) noted. Much of the 86 million acres of tribal land transferred to the National Forest system happened during Roosevelt’s tenure, which reflected Roosevelt’s racial biases.
The Times’ David French ([link removed]) , meanwhile, argued that “if you wanted to introduce people to the highest American ideals,” he would point them to “the great documents of the American founding.”
French added that “the founders were beginning from something that looked like a blank slate, trying—as much as they could within their context—to imagine what a nation could be.”
But the nation was far from a “blank slate”: The first inhabitants migrated from Siberia to America anywhere from 14,400 ([link removed]) to 29,000 ([link removed]) years before Christopher Columbus mistakenly landed in the Caribbean.
And those inhabitants had an impact on the “great documents.” The framers of the Constitution “are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles and governmental practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy,” as the Senate recognized in a 1987 resolution ([link removed]) .
The final piece in the collection was the only one to acknowledge the US genocide of Native Americans within the optimism-seeking editorial assignment. The Times’ Lydia Polgreen ([link removed]) wrote that the country’s “romance with space” was “a byproduct of America’s restless search for new terrain.” Before the 1986 Challenger disaster, space
was a wide-open zone of exploration and discovery, untainted by the bloody, genocidal rampages that characterized the westward expansion of the physical frontier.
That the space program has continued, she argued, shows a capacity to “reckon with failure, to live with grief…and forge ahead” that she hopes could be brought “home, to this land.”
** ‘Chapters that deserve criticism’
------------------------------------------------------------
USA Today: Are you going to celebrate the 250th? Here's why you should.
USA Today (6/23/26 ([link removed]) ) invited people to celebrate under the banner of "250 Years of Freedom"—including people who were denied the right to vote for most of those 250 years.
Many of the pieces across the outlets made nods toward the grimmer parts of the founding of the country, but refused to name the treatment of Native Americans. In a piece published on July 4 ([link removed]) , the New York Times editorial board wrote:
At its best, this country has been a friend to the cause of human freedom. The ledger is not clean, but any fair accounting shows a nation that has turned its enormous strength toward the good far more often than not.
The Times vaguely added that the US’s founding was “a revolutionary moral claim issued by imperfect people who did not fully live up to it.” It noted that the “nation’s early fights were mostly over which people would be granted life and liberty.”
USA Today published an opinion article (6/23/26 ([link removed]) ) by public relations specialist Mike Carpenter that pushed back against those who are “not in a partying mood” under Trump. Though the subhead noted that “as a nation, we survived the darkest days in our history and became better as a result,” and the article listed many examples of such supposedly past days, the genocide of Native Americans was not among them.
USA Today’s libertarian-conservative columnist Ingrid Jacques ([link removed]) (7/1/26 ([link removed]) ) insisted that “all Americans should read the Declaration of Independence,” because
an alarming number of Americans have lost touch with our founding in 1776 and the principles of freedom and liberty our Founding Fathers laid out in the declaration.
Jacques had nothing to say about what we should learn from that d0cuments’ prominent slur against Native Americans, or how to reconcile the idea that a nation guided by principles of “freedom and liberty” exterminated most of its original inhabitants.
** ‘Best reason to celebrate’
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: America's 250th Birthday Matters far Beyond America."
Philippa Stroud complains in the Washington Post (6/23/26 ([link removed]) ) that "students are often taught to view the West primarily through the lens of its failures and injustices." Maybe elite opinion writers didn't go to school?
Conservative USA Today columnist Dace Potas ([link removed]) (6/24/26 ([link removed]) ) wrote that “patriotism has fallen out of fashion for young people because of America's past injustices.” Potas wrote, “That’s backward—the progress we’ve made in overcoming those injustices is the best reason to celebrate this country, not resent it.”
Potas argued that the US “is such a great country in my eyes because it has been able to move past the horrible things that happened here,” including “overcoming slavery, internment camps, Jim Crow.” The US’s mass killing of Native Americans was missing from the list of things we've “move[d] past.”
The Washington Post, meanwhile, published an opinion article (6/23/26 ([link removed]) ) by Philippa Stroud, a Conservative member of the British House of Lords. Stroud asserted that “equality, liberty and the inherent dignity of every person were not inventions of 18th-century America.”
These rights “emerged from a long tradition stretching from Athens and Jerusalem through Rome and Britain before finding political expression in Philadelphia,” she explained.
Stroud argued that "every society must confront its failures honestly." But rather than address the failures of the US to deliver “equality, liberty and the inherent dignity” to every citizen, Stroud claimed that those rights had already been established by slavery-dependent theocracies and monarchies of the Iron Age.
** ‘Founded not on ethnicity’
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: This Fourth, don’t buy the snake oil of the ‘blood and soil’ right
America had no "distinctive ethnicity" in 1776, wrote Marc Thiessen (Washington Post, 7/2/26 ([link removed]) ), because "only 60% of the white population was English." But the people allowed to vote ([link removed]) were distinctly white.
The Washington Post’s Marc A. Thiessen ([link removed]) (7/2/26 ([link removed]) ) explicitly denied that those dark chapters of the country’s founding have any relevance to today’s celebrations. He argued that "our nationalism is a belief in the superiority of the American idea," not "the superiority of a particular race." He made no effort to square this claim with the reality of a country founded with only one particular race able to vote—and whose founding document cites as an example of "absolute tyranny" the king's restrictions on the colonists' ability to steal land ([link removed]) from another race.
A USA Today guest op-ed (6/28/26 ([link removed]) ) by Asan Q. Bui, director of cyberspace and technology at Headquarters Air Force Reserve Command ([link removed]) , similarly argued that the US “is one of the few nations in history founded not on ethnicity, ancestry or bloodline but on a set of principles. Those principles inspired colonists seeking self-government in 1776.”
While it’s true that the US was not founded on an idea of ethnicity that distinguished between English and Irish, Dutch and German, the young country was the crucible in which a new conception of whiteness was forged that enabled the new “melting pot” to unite against those it was stealing land from, as well as those it was stealing labor from.
The US founders granted rights ([link removed]) only to white males; Black men did not have even a theoretical right to vote until after the Civil War, while Native Americans were only given suffrage in 1924. Both groups’ voting rights were routinely ignored ([link removed]) up through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while the struggle against racist voter suppression continues today.
** ‘A cruel picture of Natives’
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: Three words in the Declaration of Independence paint a cruel picture of Natives
This online-only news piece by Dana Hedgpeth (Washington Post, 6/30/26 ([link removed]) ) noted that Declaration's "portrayal of Indigenous people helped establish a moral and legal framework that justified decades of devastating US policies toward Native communities."
One of only three mentions of Native Americans in the papers during the sample period came in passing in a Washington Post article (7/3/26 ([link removed]) ) headlined “This Mistake Helped Transform 22-Year-Old George Washington.” The piece, by former US archivist Colleen Shogan, centered on a young Washington, “who made serious mistakes, with sobering consequences,” and how he developed “leadership qualities” through “experience, the acquisition of knowledge and a willingness to learn from failure.” One of those experiences was a battle during the French and Indian war, when a leading French officer “was slain by one of Washington’s Native American allies ([link removed]) .”
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie ([link removed]) (7/1/26 ([link removed]) ) also made brief mention of Native Americans, though he did so explicitly in the context of their exclusion from the equality promised by the Declaration of Independence. "Women, Natives, landless laborers and, most starkly, Black Americans, both free and enslaved," he explains, understood the document's pronouncement of equality "as a radical statement of principle for the present." This was one line in his broader argument that the Declaration's significance lies not in how the founding fathers envisioned equality, but in how Black Americans, and abolitionists Black and white, wielded that principle to make it more truly universal.
While white writers far outnumber Black writers on the opinion pages at the country's top papers, columns like Bouie's demonstrated the importance of representation on those pages. (See also: Theodore R. Johnson at the Washington Post—7/1/26 ([link removed]) .) FAIR could identify no regular columnist at any of the four papers surveyed as Native American.
Alone among the papers, the Post does have one Native American news reporter: Dana Hedgpeth, an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe of North Carolina. Hedgpeth covers both local breaking news and Native American news for the paper.
Hedgpeth penned a piece for the Post (6/30/26 ([link removed]) ) in the news section headlined "Three Words in the Declaration of Independence Paint a Cruel Picture of Natives." The piece, which appeared online only, interviews Native American scholars and leaders for their thoughts on "the Founding Fathers’ use of the derogatory description for Indigenous people in 1776." It expands on both historical and contemporary experiences of Native Americans, and uniquely centers their voices in its reflections on the 250th anniversary.
** 'We've been here before'
------------------------------------------------------------
WSJ: A Divided Country Celebrates Its Anniversary—Again
The Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley (6/30/26 ([link removed]) ) says it's "unfortunate" that only "“about one-quarter of Americans say the US stands above all other countries in the world.”
Hedgpeth's piece is a much more in-depth exploration than any of the opinion pieces published by any of the papers. In the Wall Street Journal's only mention of Native Americans, a column by Jason L. Riley ([link removed]) (6/30/26 ([link removed]) ) headlined “A Divided Country Celebrates Its Anniversary—Again” argues that the country’s “sour mood” is nothing to worry about, as “we’ve been here before” during previous anniversaries.
In the eighth paragraph, Riley quoted historian Fergus Bordewich as asking in his book Centennial about America’s 100th birthday: “Would Native Americans survive at all, and at what cost to their embattled cultures?” Riley didn’t reflect further upon the country’s treatment of those it stole its land from, eventually concluding:
Though far from perfect, [our framework of governance] has improved over time and become the envy of the world. Remember that as some use this milestone to chronicle the nation’s shortcomings, and others to whitewash the past.
But ignoring, downplaying or dismissing those “shortcomings,” as nearly all of our nation’s prominent pundits have done, leaves us without a clear understanding of our country's history. The US has long supported ([link removed]) foreign governments that commit war crimes and mass atrocities against Indigenous peoples, as it continues to finance Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza. Averting our eyes from the fact that our Declaration of Independence was also a tirade against "merciless Indian Savages" makes it easier to miss the through line.
------------------------------------------------------------
Research assistance: Louise Liu
Read more ([link removed])
Share this post: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Twitter"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Twitter" alt="Twitter" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Facebook"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Facebook" alt="Facebook" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Pinterest"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Pinterest" alt="Pinterest" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="LinkedIn"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="LinkedIn" alt="LinkedIn" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Google Plus"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Google Plus" alt="Google Plus" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Instapaper"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Instapaper" alt="Instapaper" class="mc-share"></a>
© 2021 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you signed up for email alerts from
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Our mailing address is:
FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING
124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201
New York, NY 10001
FAIR's Website ([link removed])
FAIR counts on your support to do this work — please donate today ([link removed]) .
Follow us on Twitter ([link removed]) | Friend us on Facebook ([link removed])
change your preferences ([link removed])
Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp
[link removed]
unsubscribe ([link removed]) .
Message Analysis
- Sender: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
- Political Party: n/a
- Country: United States
- State/Locality: n/a
- Office: n/a
-
Email Providers:
- MailChimp