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 its longtime inhabitants.

The founding of the country, and its Declaration of Independence, cannot then be separated from the 96% decrease 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 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 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 that were intended 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.