Table of Contents
Declaration of Independence - Indigenous Peoples Dehumanization Viewpoint
The Declaration of Independence, in its reference to “merciless Indian Savages” and in its broader exclusion of indigenous peoples from its universalist principles, constitutes an act of dehumanization - a founding-document ratification of a racial hierarchy that placed Native Americans outside the category of rights-bearing persons and provided ideological cover for subsequent dispossession, removal, and violence. This viewpoint is held by scholars of indigenous history, critical legal theorists, Native American Studies academics, and advocates working within indigenous rights frameworks. Proponents argue that no grammatical or rhetorical analysis of the phrase's function within the Declaration's list of grievances diminishes the force of its racial characterization, and that the document's downstream effects on indigenous peoples are inseparable from a fair assessment of its language.
Core Arguments
The Phrase Encodes a Racial Category, Not Just a Military Description
Proponents of this viewpoint hold that the charge against King George III - that he “endeavoured 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” - cannot be reduced to a grievance directed solely at the Crown. The passage does more than accuse the king of an action; it asserts that indigenous peoples as a group possess a “known rule of warfare” that is inherently indiscriminate and brutal. This is a claim about the nature of a people, not merely a description of British military strategy. The characterization “merciless” and “Savages” assigns inherent qualities - cruelty, lawlessness, primitiveness - to Native Americans as a category, and the phrase's rhetorical force depends on the audience accepting this characterization as self-evidently true.
Scholars in this tradition argue that the grievance gains its power precisely because the prior judgment about indigenous peoples is treated as common ground between the document's authors and its intended readers. The king's conduct is rendered especially heinous not merely because he incited violence, but because the violence he incited was the violence of people understood to be beyond civilization. The dehumanization, on this reading, is not incidental to the rhetorical strategy - it is the engine of it.1)
The Declaration's Universalism Explicitly Excludes Indigenous Peoples
Proponents further argue that the phrase cannot be analyzed in isolation from the Declaration's broader architecture. The document's universalist language - “all men are created equal,” endowed with “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” - coexists with a passage that characterizes indigenous peoples as savage. This juxtaposition is not merely ironic or inconsistent; it is structural. The Declaration's articulation of universal rights was addressed to a specific political community, and the “merciless Indian Savages” passage marks the outer boundary of that community. Indigenous peoples are not among those whose equality and rights the document proclaims; they are among the threats from which the new political order must be defended.
This exclusion, advocates of this viewpoint contend, was not an oversight or a lapse. It reflected a coherent, if morally indefensible, political vision in which the project of settler-colonial expansion required the legal and ideological marginalization of the peoples whose lands were to be taken. The Declaration simultaneously proclaimed liberty for colonists and authorized, by implication, the subordination of those who stood in the way of that liberty's exercise.2)3)
The Enlightenment "Savage" Framework Was a Racial Hierarchy
Holders of this viewpoint are largely unpersuaded by the argument that “savage” was a neutral term of art within Enlightenment developmental theory rather than a racial designation in the modern sense. They contend that the Enlightenment stadial framework - which classified societies along a developmental continuum from “savage” to “civilized” - was itself a racial hierarchy, whatever its philosophical self-presentation. Theorists such as Vattel and Locke used this framework not merely to describe social organization but to justify dispossession: peoples classified as “savage” were deemed to lack the developed land use that grounded property rights, and therefore to have no legitimate claim to the territories they inhabited.4)
The invocation of this framework in a founding document, advocates argue, was consequential precisely because of its legal and political implications. By characterizing indigenous peoples as savages in a document that grounded the legitimacy of a new political order, the Declaration's authors embedded a racial-legal hierarchy into the ideological foundations of the American republic. The philosophical genealogy of the term does not neutralize its function; it traces the intellectual lineage of the dehumanization.5)
Effects Cannot Be Separated from Meaning
A central premise of this viewpoint is that the downstream effects of the Declaration's language are not merely unfortunate historical accidents but are connected to the document's rhetorical and ideological work. The characterization of Native Americans as savage was not confined to this single passage; it pervaded colonial and early American law, policy, and public discourse, and the Declaration's founding authority lent it political and legal weight. Subsequent policies of removal, dispossession, and forced assimilation were justified using legal and political frameworks that drew on the same ideological vocabulary the Declaration helped to ratify.
Proponents argue that this history of use is relevant to any honest assessment of what the phrase means and has meant. A text is not exhausted by its authors' intentions; it is also constituted by the uses to which it has been put and the effects it has produced. On this view, insisting on a strictly grammatical or intentionalist reading of the “Indian Savages” passage - one that confines its meaning to the charge against the Crown - is a form of selective historical attention that immunizes the document against moral scrutiny by abstracting it from its consequences.6)7)
History and Development
The scholarly foundation for this viewpoint was substantially developed in the latter decades of the twentieth century, as indigenous studies emerged as a distinct academic discipline and critical legal scholars began examining the ideological structures underlying American Indian law. Robert A. Williams Jr.'s The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (1990) provided a systematic analysis of the European legal and philosophical traditions that characterized indigenous peoples as savage and traced their incorporation into American legal doctrine. Vine Deloria Jr., whose earlier work Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) had established a sharp indigenous intellectual critique of American historiography, contributed to the legal dimension of this analysis in collaboration with David Wilkins.8)
The viewpoint gained broader traction in academic and public discourse during debates over the quincentennial of Columbus's arrival (1992), which generated sustained scholarly attention to the ideological frameworks underpinning European colonization of the Americas. It has since been reinforced by scholarship in settler-colonial studies, which applies theoretical frameworks developed by scholars such as Patrick Wolfe to the analysis of American history and law.9) Within this framework, the Declaration's “Indian Savages” passage is treated not as an isolated rhetorical lapse but as one instantiation of a pervasive ideological structure that defined indigenous peoples out of the category of rights-bearing persons in order to facilitate territorial expansion.
In recent years, the viewpoint has gained practical expression in debates over how the Declaration is taught in K-12 curricula, how it is read aloud at public ceremonies, and how it is contextualized in museum exhibits and civic education. Several indigenous scholars and advocacy organizations have argued that contextual framing is insufficient - that the phrase's presence in the document requires explicit acknowledgment of its dehumanizing function, not merely historical explanation.
Notable Proponents
Robert A. Williams Jr. - Lumbee legal scholar and professor at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, whose The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (1990) provides the most systematic scholarly account of how European and American legal discourse constructed indigenous peoples as savage and thereby justified dispossession. His later work Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America (2005) extends this analysis into modern constitutional law.
Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005) - Standing Rock Sioux scholar, theologian, and activist whose work across law, history, and political theory articulated a comprehensive indigenous critique of American foundational mythology. His collaborations with David Wilkins on federal Indian law provided the legal dimension of the dehumanization argument.
David E. Wilkins - Lumbee political scientist at the University of Minnesota whose scholarship on federal Indian law and indigenous sovereignty, particularly Uneven Ground (co-authored with K. Tsianina Lomawaima) and Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations (with Deloria), situates the Declaration's language within the broader history of American law's treatment of indigenous peoples.
Steven T. Newcomb - Shawnee/Lenape scholar and co-founder of the Indigenous Law Institute, whose work on the Doctrine of Discovery and the ideological foundations of American Indian law argues that the “savage” framework in founding documents has direct legal continuity with contemporary federal Indian policy.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Historian and author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014), which situates the Declaration's language within a broader argument that the United States was founded on and sustained by the systematic elimination and dehumanization of indigenous peoples.10)
Internal Debates
Proponents of the dehumanization viewpoint disagree among themselves on several questions.
Intentionalism vs. structural analysis. Some scholars within this tradition retain a degree of intentionalism, arguing that it matters whether Jefferson and the Declaration's other authors were consciously deploying a dehumanizing racial ideology or were unreflectively reproducing the conventions of their time. Others, particularly those working within settler-colonial studies frameworks, regard this question as secondary: the structure of the ideology and its effects are what demand analysis, and authorial intent neither mitigates the harm nor explains the document's subsequent uses.
Reform vs. rejection. There is meaningful disagreement about the appropriate political and pedagogical response to the Declaration's dehumanizing language. Some scholars and advocates argue for robust contextualization - acknowledging the phrase's racial function while preserving the document's historical significance and the genuine philosophical achievements of its universalist language. Others contend that the contradiction between the Declaration's universalism and its exclusion of indigenous peoples is too fundamental to be resolved by contextualization, and that the document's canonical status in American civic life requires a more thoroughgoing critical reckoning.
The agency question. A minority position within this viewpoint holds that emphasizing the Declaration's dehumanization of indigenous peoples, while accurate, risks reproducing a victimhood framework that itself diminishes indigenous agency. Some indigenous scholars prefer analytical frameworks that center Native nations as sovereign political actors pursuing their own strategic interests - including their decisions to ally with the British - rather than primarily as objects of colonial ideology. This position does not deny the dehumanizing function of the Declaration's language but questions whether it should be the primary lens through which indigenous experience in the Revolutionary period is understood. See Declaration of Independence - Indigenous Sovereignty Viewpoint.
Related Pages
Notes
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