An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Indigenous” meant the opposite. And it wasn’t just property that European
settlers were creating. In the development of their governing ideology, they
believed “that the preservation and enhancement of their own democratic
institutions required Indian dispossession and the coercive use of dependent
groups, most prominently slaves, in order to ensure that they themselves
had access to property.” 3 The core foundations of US democracy, and white
people’s strong belief in its possibilities were, from the beginning, based on
the subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples. Until we as a nation—and
white people in particular—come to terms with this, we aren’t ever really
going to see any real changes.
The ideological roots of US democracy are rooted in whiteness. Whites
believed that economic independence meant freedom and citizenship; it
meant the continued expansion of US empire, the continued exclusion of
Black and Indigenous peoples, and the continued immigration of certain
European immigrants. 4 These were the wages of their idea of freedom and
belonging. But there is a reason that, within this country, the ideological
roots of words such as “freedom” have remained fundamentally different
for different people throughout US history. Black people have sought to be
free from the chains of enslavement and the stigma assigned to them.
Indigenous peoples have maintained their sovereignty as a counter to the
settler project of US democracy. And white people have desired freedom—
the ability to be first-class citizens—through their ability to acquire
property. Again, one could become a property owner through enslavement
and Indigenous dispossession, both of which contributed to the
development of white citizenship.
US DEMOCRATIC FORMATIONS
According to Haudenosaunee oral history, the founders of US democracy
conceptually drew their ideas of a constitution from the Iroquois
Confederacy. Although the evidence is scarce—and why Native people
would want to align their conception of democracy with that of the United
States is baffling—there is some evidence that at least partially illustrates
this point. In 1754, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Hutchinson wrote the
Albany Plan. This plan was designed to settle the relationship between the
thirteen colonies. While they would each be independent, they would also
be mutually interconnected in a large-scale sense, under the direction of a