OUR CELEBRATION OF THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence offers a chance to reflect on the importance of cultural identity, diversity, and traditions and to work toward a future that upholds these core human values. Jefferson's treatment of Native Americans shows how easily these values can be undermined, while the resilience of current Native American communities highlights the strength of the human spirit.In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson urged the colonists to break away from Great Britain. One of the charges against King George III was that he “excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”1Thomas Jefferson's attitudes and actions toward Indigenous Nations and African Americans were complex. As shown above, he dismissed Indigenous Nations as a unified whole to encourage colonists to rebel against King George III. During the American Revolution, as governor of Virginia, he proposed a policy of forcibly removing tribes allied with the British. As president (1801–1809), he promoted a program of assimilation by urging tribes to adopt farming lifestyles. By 1803, frustrated by Native American resistance and slow progress in securing the nation's western boundary, he instructed William Henry Harrison, the territorial governor of Indiana, to encourage Native Americans to incur debt, settle their accounts with land cessions, and then relocate landless tribes to the recently acquired Louisiana Purchase, west of the Mississippi River. Harrison's implementation of Jefferson's strategies in the Illinois Territory shows how the author of the Declaration of Independence undermined the independence of many Indigenous Nations east of the Mississippi.2Using historical data collected by the Indian Claims Commission, created in 1946 to settle tribal claims related to treaties and to seek justice, along with archaeological studies, we can reconstruct the tribal landscape of the Illinois Country in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This landscape included several Indigenous Nations.The Kaskaskia and closely related Miami tribes lived near Le Rocher on the upper Illinois River and along Lake Peoria.34 Potawatomi groups expanded their territory from present-day Michigan and Wisconsin to include the Des Plaines and Kankakee River valleys, and the upper reaches of the Illinois River in the 1690s.5 In 1722, the Sac & Fox people moved into the Illinois Territory and established villages in the Mississippi and Rock River valleys.6 Kickapoo groups migrated to the Illinois Country from what is now Wisconsin in the mid-eighteenth century. They eventually settled in a series of villages along the tributaries of the Sangamon and Vermilion rivers.7During the last decade of the eighteenth century, Native American tribes, including representatives from Indigenous Nations in the Illinois Country and beyond, formed an unprecedented alliance to oppose American expansion. In 1794, they were defeated by troops led by Anthony Wayne, and the resulting Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., in 1795 involved the first land cessions to the United States in the Illinois Country, with several small parcels in strategic locations identified to support future settlement and transportation.8In a letter to Harrison in 1803, Jefferson explained his reasoning and strategies for establishing a western border of the new Nation and protecting the then-western frontier.In 1803, Harrison began a six-year process of treaty negotiations that transferred most of what is now Illinois from Indigenous peoples to the United States. The first two treaties were the Treaty with the Kaskaskia in 1803,10 covering about 17 million acres, and the Treaty of St. Louis in 1804,11 which involved roughly 11 million acres in Illinois. The circumstances of the treaty negotiations—such as the Kaskaskia having been significantly weakened by waves of immigrant tribes fleeing American settlement, and Sauk and Fox representatives traveling to St. Louis to plead for the release of a man they believed had been wrongly imprisoned—gave Harrison considerable leverage, as these treaties still testify to today. This process culminated in the Treaty of Chicago, 1833,12 which displaced the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi from their ancestral lands in Illinois.Our celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence offers an opportunity to reflect on the loss of independence, cultural identity, and traditions, as well as the rise of economic struggles, health disparities, and the erosion of tribal sovereignty faced by Native Americans. At the same time, and more importantly, this anniversary also allows us to honor Indigenous Nations, who have survived and often thrived in their efforts to preserve their heritage, honor their ancestors, and secure their future. They deserve much more from all of us who gained independence at the expense of so many.
Michael D. Wiant (Thu,) studied this question.