As America prepares to honor the 250th anniversary of its founding, historians and Indigenous people are working to remind this nation of its dealings with Native people and of the contributions that Native people have made to this country’s establishment.

Perhaps one of the most important contributions Native people have made to America is providing a framework for this country’s governmental structure.

“They say ‘Greek and Roman’ and talk about all the influences, but the Founding Fathers had never seen a working confederacy of nations ever, ever, ever. They had dreamt about it. They had heard about it,” said Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee. “Nothing had been like that in Europe. It had never happened, and the first confederacy of Native nations they met and experienced they did in this country, and in our country, in our territories, and that was everyone from the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations, Iroquois Confederacy, to the Anishinaabe Confederacy, the Muskogee Confederacy.”

Harjo holds her own place in American history, having spent a lifetime as both a teller of Native stories and an activist who has worked to empower Native voices, most notably leading the effort to get the Washington professional football team to change its offensive Native nickname. She has both made and explained history and said while life for Native people has improved over the past 250 years – a period marked by epidemics, warfare, broken treaties, stolen land, stolen children, and erasure – America still has much work to do to address its sordid history.