As we mark the nation’s 250th birthday this Fourth of July, we are sure to be reminded of the words of our forefathers.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident ...”
The preamble to the Declaration of Independence is what most people know and is said to have set the philosophical foundation of the county. Yet, at the time, it was not a novel assertion.
“There wasn't really a dispute with that part of the Declaration,” said Michael Oberg, a history professor at SUNY-Geneseo. “Where the English argued was at the different grievances.”
And there were many. Oberg points to one, in particular: The last one.
“Where the colonists accused (King) George III of stirring up slave insurrection and unleashing on the American frontiers ‘the merciless Indian savages’ whose only known rule of warfare is the, I can't remember the exact phrase, but the indiscriminate slaughter of all sexes and conditions,” he said. “That's hardwired into the national DNA.”
Oberg’s focus is Native American studies, and the history he recounts — researched and sourced from firsthand accounts — is more complicated than the star-spangled version being celebrated across New York and the nation.
“New York played a pivotal role in America’s fight for independence so there’s no better place to mark the 250th birthday of our nation,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said this week. “We remain a beacon of hope and freedom for those around the world.”
But the way Oberg tells it: “New York could not have become the Empire State without a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession, and that program of dispossession was launched on turbo during the American Revolution.”
Revisiting past monuments
Atop one of the highest hills in Mount Hope Cemetery, overlooking the Genesee River to the west, is the tombstone of the city’s namesake, Col. Nathaniel Rochester. He served two stints in the Revolutionary War but played no critical role in its outcome.
On his tombstone the epitaph — written in Latin — are the words,“Si monumentum requiris, circumspice," which translates to: “If you seek his monument, look around you.”
This was Seneca land, some of which Rochester and other speculators acquired through a circuitous and questionable land sale. The war ravaged the Seneca territory, but it was not a conquest.
“If you are a landowner on, say, any of the land west of the Genesee River, from the Genesee to Lake Erie to the Niagara River, right? That big chunk of Western New York, you are the beneficiary of a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that at times and places violated the laws of the United States,” Oberg said. “There's no doubt about that. It’s black and white in the (historical) documents.
“So the question then is, you know, okay, what are we going to do about it?” he continued. “And to revise and take down some of these monuments is a minimal first step.”
In New York state, leaders formed a 250th Commemoration Commission "committed to recognizing the state’s role in the formation of the United States.” Part of that effort is to work with Indigenous Nations to ensure historical markers are “as accurate and culturally sensitive as possible,” according to a statement from the New York state Department of Education.
It’s a start. And Seneca Nation of Indians President J. Conrad Seneca said he would like to see markers added to include the Haudenosaunee people more fully in the narrative.
A deeper conversation
“All of these different traumatic things ... from the Revolutionary War forward, a lot of things that have piled on trauma after trauma on Indigenous people and Seneca people,” he said. “We have to find a way to be able to not forget about those things, and to be able to address that.”
It’s also important for Native people that the full story is told. Because the more clear-eyed discussion there is about the history, however complicated and difficult, the better the opportunity is to have a healing process, Seneca said.
For Oberg, that’s one of the lost opportunities of the moment, and why he laments that the passage of time is cast in this semiquincentennial year as “the unfinished revolution” — highlighting progress toward equality, marked in milestones — and setbacks.
"If we have yet to create a society based upon the premise that all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness — if we haven't achieved that yet after 250 years,” he said, “maybe it's possible that a significant number of Americans don't believe that and haven't believed in that.”
