Declaration of Independence Calls Native Americans 'Merciless Indian Savages.' Schools Skip the Rest.

The document read aloud every July 4 ends with a slur. The Declaration of Independence’s final grievance against King George accuses him of setting loose “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions,” in the official National Archives transcript. It is the 27th and last complaint on the list, the position historians read as the climax.

The line was not an aside. It named Native nations as enemies of the new country at the moment the country declared itself, and the policy that followed matched the language.

The Founding Included Removal and Camps

The government spent the next century moving Native people off their land by force. President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830. In the winter of 1838, the Army forced roughly 16,000 Cherokee west on the Trail of Tears, and at least 4,000 died of exposure, hunger, and disease along the way.

The camps came too. In 1864, the Army marched about 10,000 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache to an internment camp at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, a place the Smithsonian describes as a site of imprisonment. The water sickened people, the land could not grow food, and roughly a quarter of those held there died before a treaty let the survivors go home in 1868.

Why Most Americans Never Learn It

This record is documented, and it is mostly absent from classrooms. A study cited by the National Congress of American Indians found that 87% of state history standards do not cover Native American history after 1900, and 27 states do not name a single individual Native person in their K-12 standards. Native people are taught as something that happened, not someone who is here.

What fills the gap is not careful history. It is the compressed, unsourced version of the past that travels in a short video, where the Trail of Tears and Bosque Redondo never appear and there is no prompt to check.

The Comparison Indigenous Scholars Draw

Native writers connect that founding pattern to the present. On the eve of the 250th, Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle argued that the machinery for deciding who belongs in America and removing those who do not was built at the start, not bolted on later. Advocates make the same point about today’s immigration system, where the government detains people in camps and moves them by force.

The scales and the specifics differ, and naming that is part of being honest about it. What Nagle and others ask readers to see is the through-line, the way a country can define a group as outside the nation and then remove or detain them. That is not settled history but a live question.

Sitting with the full record is not an attack on the country. It is the harder, more honest form of patriotism, the kind that can celebrate 250 years and still refuse to lie about them.

What You Can Do Now

Learn the history from the people who carry it. The Smithsonian’s Native Knowledge 360° offers sourced, classroom-ready material on removal, Bosque Redondo, and Native nations today. Share it when the compressed version shows up in your feed.
Push your state to teach it. Ask your state board of education and state legislators whether the standards cover Native history after 1900. If your state is one of the 27 that names no individual Native person, that is a specific, fixable gap.
Slow down your own news. Before sharing a clip about history or current events, find the primary source or a named reporter behind it. A three-second video is a starting point for a question, not an answer.