When the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, it asserted that “all men are created equal” and were endowed with “certain inalienable rights.” Those words would echo through generations—yet the story of American freedom is inseparable from the Indigenous nations whose lands, treaties, and political traditions shaped the very ground on which that experiment was built. From the Haudenosaunee Confederacy‘s centuries-old council system to the sovereignty struggles that continue today, Native history is not a footnote to the American story—it is a parallel and often defining current running through it. This chronicle examines eight milestones in the American pursuit of liberty, reframed through the lens of Indigenous diplomacy, dispossession, and enduring resilience.
The Declaration of Independence and the Native Nations Left Unmentioned
More than a year after colonial militia and British forces clashed at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia finally moved toward separation. The Declaration’s primary function was to catalog grievances against King George III—including his encouragement of “domestic insurrections amongst us” and his failure to restrain “the merciless Indian Savages,” language that framed Native nations as adversaries rather than sovereign peoples.
Yet the political philosophy animating the document drew on Indigenous precedent. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, later joined by the Tuscarora—had governed through the Great Law of Peace for centuries before European arrival. Colonial leaders such as Benjamin Franklin openly studied this confederacy model, and the 1754 Albany Plan of Union explicitly referenced it. The irony remains sharp: the nation that declared universal rights was simultaneously preparing to expand into Indigenous territories west of the Appalachians.
The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Treaty Clause
The 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia produced a document balancing federal authority with individual protections. Ratified in December 1791, the first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights—guaranteed freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly, the right to bear arms, and the right to a fair trial.
Buried in Article VI, however, was a clause with enormous Indigenous consequence: the Treaty Clause, which vested treaty-making authority in the federal government. This established that treaties with tribal nations would be the “supreme Law of the Land”—a recognition of Native sovereignty that the United States would honor inconsistently for the next two centuries. The 1794 Treaty of Greenville, which ended the Northwest Indian War, became one of the earliest tests of this constitutional framework, ceding vast portions of the Ohio Country while formally acknowledging tribal signatories as sovereign parties.
Emancipation and the Parallel Question of Native Enslavement
By 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had concluded that emancipation was essential to Union victory. The Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, applied only to Confederate-held territory, but the Gettysburg Address that November reframed the war as a struggle for a “new birth of freedom.” The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery nationwide—freeing more than four million African Americans.
For Native nations, freedom had a different and more complicated meaning. The same Lincoln administration that signed the Emancipation Proclamation also authorized the Dakota 38 mass execution in Mankato, Minnesota, in December 1862—the largest single-day execution in American history. And sovereignty itself remained contested: Native people were not granted U.S. citizenship until the Snyder Act of 1924, and many states barred Native voting for decades afterward.
Immigration, Exclusion, and the Immigrant Nations of Turtle Island
Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants arrived in the United States fleeing persecution, famine, and revolution—Eastern European Jews, southern Italians, Armenians, and Mexicans among them. Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus” enshrined the Statue of Liberty as a beacon to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
That same era codified exclusion against Asians through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For Native nations, the period brought land loss on an industrial scale: the Dawes Act of 1887 broke communal tribal landholding into individual allotments, ultimately transferring some 90 million acres—roughly two-thirds of the remaining Indigenous land base—out of Native hands. Freedom for new arrivals and continued dispossession of original inhabitants were unfolding simultaneously.
The 19th Amendment and Indigenous Women’s Political Traditions
Seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, ratification of the 19th Amendment in August 1920 extended the vote to women nationwide. The suffrage movement had been galvanized by decades of protest, imprisonment, and hunger strikes.
Yet within many Indigenous nations, women already held formal political authority that predated the amendment by centuries. Haudenosaunee clan mothers held the power to nominate and remove chiefs and could veto declarations of war. Cherokee women historically held agricultural authority and, in some clans, property. The 1920 amendment applied inconsistently to Native women, many of whom remained ineligible because of their tribal citizenship status until the Snyder Act.
D-Day, Liberation, and the Native Code Talkers of World War II
On June 6, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower broadcast that “the hour of your liberation is approaching.” By nightfall, some 156,000 Allied troops had landed across five Normandy beachheads, initiating the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi occupation.
Among the forces landing that day and in the campaigns that followed were Navajo Code Talkers, whose Diné-language transmissions remained unbroken by Japanese cryptographers. Indigenous service members fought in disproportionate numbers—by some estimates, nearly one in four eligible Native men served during World War II. Correspondence by Navajo Code Talker Samuel Sandoval affirms the enduring legacy of the Diné code language in securing Allied communications.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Native Sovereignty Movement
In 1963, with civil rights activists facing violent opposition across the South and hundreds of thousands marching on Washington for “Jobs and Freedom,” President John F. Kennedy introduced the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. After his assassination that November, President Lyndon B. Johnson drove the bill through Congress, signing the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964. It ended segregation in public accommodations and barred discrimination by race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
The Civil Rights Act empowered Native activists. The Occupation of Alcatraz (1969–1971), the Trail of Broken Treaties (1972), and the Wounded Knee occupation (1973) drew on both the civil rights movement’s tactics and inherent tribal sovereignty claims. These actions catalyzed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which restored substantial authority to tribal governments over their own programs and children.
Obergefell v. Hodges and the Question of Equality Within Sovereignty
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Constitution guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion held that the freedom to marry is among the fundamental liberties protected by the 14th Amendment, echoing the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision striking down bans on interracial marriage. Kennedy wrote that same-sex couples “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law”—and “the Constitution grants them that right.”
The ruling did not automatically apply to federally recognized tribal nations, which retain inherent sovereignty and jurisdiction over domestic relations within their territories. Several tribes—including the Coquille, Suquamish, and Pokagon Band of Potawatomi—had already recognized same-sex marriage under tribal law before Obergefell, illustrating how Indigenous nations have long exercised self-governance independent of federal court rulings.
Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways
Across these eight milestones, a consistent pattern emerges: American freedom expanded through contestation and has always been entangled with Indigenous nations—sometimes as inspiration, frequently as exclusion, and enduringly as sovereign parties whose treaties remain legally binding. The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace prefigured the federalism debated in 1787. The Treaty Clause made tribal agreements the “supreme Law of the Land,” a fact the Supreme Court reaffirmed as recently as 2020 in McGirt v. Oklahoma. The Dakota 38 execution and the Dawes Act reveal that the same administrations celebrated for expanding freedom were also enforcing dispossession. Native women’s political authority long preceded the 19th Amendment, and Native tribes continue to exercise marital and family jurisdiction outside federal precedent. Understanding American liberty requires understanding Native history as its central, not peripheral, framework.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the Founding Fathers actually draw on Indigenous political models?
Yes. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, formalized centuries before European contact and codified in the Great Law of Peace, inspired colonial proposals for union. Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 Albany Plan of Union explicitly praised the confederacy’s structure, and figures like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams corresponded about Indigenous governance. Scholars continue to debate the precise degree of influence, but the intellectual exchange is documented.
What is the Treaty Clause and why does it matter for Native sovereignty?
Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution establishes that treaties made by the federal government are the “supreme Law of the Land.” Because the United States signed hundreds of treaties with tribal nations between 1778 and 1871, those documents remain legally binding. The 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma decision reaffirmed that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s 1833 reservation was never disestablished.
Were Native Americans included in the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment?
No. The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to enslaved people in Confederate-held territory, and the 13th Amendment abolished chattel slavery across the United States. Native enslavement had been practiced by some colonial powers and tribal nations, and Native people did not receive U.S. citizenship until the Snyder Act of 1924.
When did Native women gain the right to vote, and what about their traditional political roles?
The 19th Amendment (1920) extended voting rights to women, but many Native women could not vote until the Snyder Act (1924) and subsequent state laws removed additional barriers. In many Indigenous nations, women already held formal political power—Haudenosaunee clan mothers selected and could remove chiefs, and Cherokee women held significant authority within clan and agricultural systems.
Did Obergefell v. Hodges apply to tribal nations?
Not automatically. Federally recognized tribes retain inherent sovereignty over domestic relations, and many do not automatically incorporate federal court rulings into their own law. Several tribes—including the Coquille Tribe (2008), the Suquamish Tribe (2011), and the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi (2013)—recognized same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court’s decision.
Cultural Legacy and Modern Preservation
The laws, treaties, and political struggles chronicled above do not exist only in the past. Tribal nations today operate their own courts, school systems, health services, and cultural preservation programs. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990, requires federally funded institutions to return ancestral remains and sacred objects to their affiliated tribes. Land-back movements, language revitalization programs, and tribal co-management of public lands are reshaping how the United States relates to its constitutional obligations. Understanding American freedom consequently means understanding how Indigenous nations continue to define, defend, and expand it—not as relics of history, but as living sovereign governments.
