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Holders of the indigenous sovereignty viewpoint argue that the Declaration of Independence (1776) represents not merely a statement of colonial grievances against Britain but an act of political exclusion that deliberately placed indigenous peoples outside the founding compact — peoples who were not subjects of the Crown but independent political nations with their own governance, territorial claims, and treaty relationships. On this view, the Declaration's treatment of Native Americans — culminating in the description of “merciless Indian Savages” in its final grievance — is not an incidental rhetorical artifact but a constitutive act: the founding of the American republic required the erasure of indigenous political standing as a legal and philosophical premise. This viewpoint is held by a range of indigenous scholars, tribal governments, legal theorists, and historians of the colonial period, and encompasses significant internal variation on both the diagnosis and the appropriate response.

Proponents of this viewpoint argue that indigenous peoples were not forgotten or overlooked in the Declaration's universalist claims — they were actively excluded. The phrase “all men are created equal” was composed by men who simultaneously characterized the continent's original inhabitants as “merciless Savages” and who derived much of their political grievance from the Crown's restrictions on colonial expansion into indigenous territories. Holders of this view contend that this is not a contradiction requiring explanation but a coherent position: the Declaration's political community was defined in part by the exclusion of indigenous peoples from it. The universalism was bounded, and the boundary was drawn in racial and civilizational terms.

A recurring argument within this viewpoint concerns the Declaration's charge that the Crown “has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migration hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” Proponents read this, alongside the “merciless Indian Savages” passage, as evidence that a central colonial grievance was the Crown's interference with westward expansion — specifically, the Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains in order to preserve those territories for indigenous nations. On this reading, the Declaration is in part a declaration of intent to dispossess: independence from Britain meant freedom to expand into lands the Crown had attempted to protect. The “Indian Savages” passage, on this view, served to rhetorically neutralize the political standing of the peoples whose territories were at stake.[(11)]

A foundational premise of this viewpoint is that the indigenous nations present in North America in 1776 were not subjects awaiting inclusion in a new political order but sovereign political communities with their own governance structures, diplomatic relationships, and territorial claims. Proponents argue that these nations had engaged in treaty relationships with European powers — including Britain — that recognized them as distinct political entities. The Declaration's founding act did not create indigenous peoples' political standing; it chose to disregard it. Many indigenous scholars note that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (the Iroquois League), whose political structure has been invoked by some historians as a possible influence on the framers' thinking about federal governance, was a functioning multi-nation political body with centuries of constitutional practice. The irony that the founders may have drawn on indigenous governance models while simultaneously defining indigenous peoples as outside the political order is a recurring theme in this literature.

Proponents point to the legal architecture that followed the founding as evidence that the Declaration's treatment of indigenous peoples was not rhetorical excess but programmatic. The Marshall Trilogy — Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) — established the Doctrine of Discovery as the legal basis for American title to indigenous lands, held that tribes were “domestic dependent nations” rather than fully sovereign entities, and created the framework of federal plenary power over tribal affairs that persists to the present. Holders of this view argue that these decisions elaborate premises already present in the Declaration: that indigenous peoples' political standing is real enough to require legal management but subordinate enough to be extinguished by Euro-American settlement. The Declaration's founding exclusion, on this account, was judicially institutionalized within fifty years.

Some advocates of this viewpoint argue that the document should be evaluated not only as a statement of principles but as a historical cause: the founding of a state that subsequently pursued policies of removal, forced assimilation, treaty abrogation, and cultural destruction on a continental scale. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Trail of Tears, the reservation system, the allotment era under the Dawes Act of 1887, and the boarding school system are, on this reading, downstream consequences of the political order the Declaration inaugurated — an order that defined indigenous peoples as obstacles to national development rather than as rights-bearing persons within the polity.

The indigenous sovereignty critique of the Declaration developed alongside, and often in tension with, the broader American civil rights tradition. Mid-twentieth century indigenous political activism — represented by organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians (founded 1944) and later the American Indian Movement (founded 1968) — pressed for treaty rights, tribal self-determination, and an end to the termination policy, but often framed demands within the existing legal framework rather than mounting a fundamental critique of the founding.

Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (1974) marked a shift: Deloria combined legal sophistication with an explicit argument that indigenous peoples' relationship to American law was one of managed subjection rather than inclusion. His work established that indigenous political claims could not be adequately addressed by civil rights frameworks designed to incorporate excluded groups into an existing polity, because the exclusion of indigenous peoples was constitutive of the polity itself, not a departure from its principles.

The theoretical elaboration of this critique accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s with the growth of indigenous studies as an academic field. The influence of postcolonial theory and critical legal studies provided frameworks for analyzing the founding documents as instruments of colonial governance rather than imperfect realizations of universal ideals. Scholars began to examine the Declaration specifically as a text that managed indigenous political standing through language — deploying “savagery” as both a racial characterization and a legal exclusion.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted by the General Assembly in 2007 (with the United States as one of four dissenting votes, reversing course to endorse it in 2010), provided a contemporary international framework against which advocates measure the founding documents' treatment of indigenous peoples. UNDRIP's affirmation of indigenous rights to self-determination, free prior informed consent, and cultural integrity stands, for many proponents of this viewpoint, in explicit contrast to the political order inaugurated by the American founding.

Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux, 1933–2005) — The most influential indigenous intellectual of the twentieth century. His works Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (1974), and Red Earth, White Lies (1995) offered sustained critiques of the legal, political, and intellectual frameworks through which American institutions managed indigenous peoples. Deloria argued that the founding documents encoded a relationship of managed subjection rather than inclusion and that indigenous liberation required escaping juridical categories rather than seeking fuller incorporation into them.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz — Historian and author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014), which offers a systematic reinterpretation of American history from indigenous perspectives, situating the founding in a settler-colonial framework and arguing that the Declaration's treatment of indigenous peoples was central rather than peripheral to its political project.

Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) — Historian at Yale University whose The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023) argues that indigenous peoples must be understood as central actors in American history from the colonial period forward, and that the founding era's treatment of Native nations shaped the constitutional order in ways that have been systematically underappreciated.

Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) — Legal scholar and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (2008), which traces the theological and legal foundations of the Doctrine of Discovery and argues that American law's treatment of indigenous title derives from a framework of Christian domination embedded in the founding legal culture.

Audra Simpson (Kahnawa:ke Mohawk) — Anthropologist at Columbia University whose Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014) examines how Mohawk political identity exceeds and resists the categories available within American and Canadian sovereignty frameworks.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) — Scholar and author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (2019), who has written on the inadequacy of civil rights and environmental justice frameworks for addressing indigenous political claims rooted in prior sovereignty.

One of the most significant internal disputes concerns whether the appropriate response to the founding exclusion is to press for genuine recognition of indigenous sovereignty within the American legal order, or whether the concept of sovereignty itself is, as some indigenous critics argue, a European legal construct that requires indigenous peoples to reconstitute themselves in alien political forms as a condition of recognition. Glen Coulthard and Taiaiake Alfred have argued that pursuing sovereignty recognition orients indigenous political energy toward the state rather than toward land, community, and self-determined resurgence, and that the recognition framework reproduces colonial relations by requiring indigenous peoples to conform to categories set by the recognizing power. Others, including many tribal governments and legal advocates, argue that sovereignty claims — however imperfect in their legal framing — are the most effective available instrument for protecting indigenous lands, resources, and governance, and that abandoning the framework would leave communities exposed to worse outcomes.

Within the viewpoint there is disagreement about whether the primary demand should be enforcement of existing treaty rights — a more limited legal claim that accepts the existing framework while insisting on its terms — or whether the founding exclusion requires a more sweeping reparative response that could include land restitution, jurisdictional restoration, and structural changes to the federal-tribal relationship. Treaty rights advocates argue that the United States' own legal commitments, repeatedly violated, provide a strong and accessible basis for claims; more radical proponents argue that treaty frameworks were themselves tools of managed dispossession and that reliance on them accepts colonial premises.

There is internal debate about whether the indigenous sovereignty critique should align with or distinguish itself from African American civil rights traditions and broader progressive movements. Some indigenous scholars argue that settler colonialism and chattel slavery require related but distinct analytical frameworks — that indigenous peoples' primary political claim is territorial and pre-sovereign rather than an inclusion claim — and that collapsing the two traditions distorts both. Others argue for solidarity frameworks that connect indigenous dispossession to other histories of racialized exclusion and find common cause in critiques of the founding order. The question has practical as well as theoretical dimensions, bearing on coalition strategy, legal framing, and the politics of historical memory.

A recurring internal tension concerns how to evaluate the Declaration's universalist language in light of its specific treatment of indigenous peoples. Some proponents treat the “all men are created equal” clause as simply inapplicable to indigenous peoples on the founders' own terms and focus analysis on what the document actually said and did rather than on its stated aspirations. Others argue that the universalist language can be reclaimed — that the Declaration's stated principles, properly applied, would condemn the exclusions built into the founding order — and that indigenous peoples can appeal to the Declaration against its own original application. A third position holds that the universalist framework is itself a European political inheritance incompatible with indigenous political philosophy and that engaging with it on its own terms, whether critically or approvingly, concedes too much.

• Declaration of Independence - "Indian Savages" - Controversy
• Declaration of Independence
• Declaration of Independence - History
• Declaration of Independence - Indigenous Dehumanization - Viewpoint
• Declaration of Independence - Land Dispossession - Viewpoint
• Declaration of Independence - Frontier Grievance - Viewpoint
• Declaration of Independence - Universalism and Contradiction - Debate
• Tribal Sovereignty
• Tribal Sovereignty - Colonial Imposition - Viewpoint
• Tribal Sovereignty - Restorationist Viewpoint
• Tribal Sovereignty - Federal Law Consensus
• Doctrine of Discovery
• Colonial-Native American Relations - History
• Proclamation of 1763
• Settler Colonialism Theory - Academic Viewpoint
• Indigenous Resurgence

~~FOOTNOTES~~

[(1)] Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969).

[(2)] Vine Deloria Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (New York: Delacorte Press, 1974).

[(3)] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).

[(4)] Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).

[(5)] Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008).

[(6)] Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

[(7)] Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

[(8)] Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 1999).

[(9)] Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823); Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1 (1831); Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832).

[(10)] United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, G.A. Res. 61/295, U.N. Doc. A/RES/61/295 (Sept. 13, 2007).

[(11)] Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[(12)] Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019).