Osiyo,
I join with Americans across the United States to celebrate the country's 250th birthday.
As both an American, and a Native American, I can look back across 250 years of American history and find dark chapters, bright chapters and reason to be optimistic.
These two things can be true at the same time: America is at once the most powerful potential force for freedom and justice on the planet — and yet it has failed many times to live up to that potential, at times betraying its bedrock principles.
America is a country founded on the idea that all people are created equal.
Yet, we know that at the country's founding, Native Americans were referred to in the Declaration of Independence as "merciless Indian savages" and that the Constitution embedded the enslavement of Black people as chattel. At the founding, women were second-class citizens.
The founders cherished freedom and democracy. But at the founding it was democracy for some, not all. War, constitutional amendments and struggles for civil rights were needed to bend the country towards a fuller experience of equality and freedom for all.
Against this backdrop, people who have struggled — or who descend from people who struggled for civil rights on the basis of race, national origin, gender and political status — sometimes wrestle with our love of America with our clear-eyed understanding of where the country has erred.
For Native peoples, we often see America through a lens of a country imposed upon our tribal lands by settlers and a government that broke every treaty it ever made with tribal nations. For Cherokees, we recall, painfully, the failures of a federal Indian policy which often treated us as a problem to be solved, or even a people to be extinguished.
Native peoples, along with many historically marginalized people across the country, struggle at times when confronted with America's birthday.
There is nothing wrong with that struggle as we reflect on the meaning of America's 250th birthday. In fact, the freedom to contemplate, to speak out, to criticize, to agonize with uncertainty and to push for progress is perhaps the most American of ways to celebrate the country.
But just as we recall the dark chapters of the country, we can also recall the strengths and triumphs of America. The American experience in democracy has made so much possible for expanding democracy, securing justice and extending freedom in America, and worldwide.
We can celebrate achievements in free government, human rights, economics, science and the arts. We can also acknowledge that America, at its founding, was an imperfect system.
America is an experiment in something rare in all of world history: participatory democracy based on the rule of law. World history records more dictators and despots than it records democracies.
Democracies have the potential to be as good as the people who participate in them.
This means an America built on the backs of slaves could choose to liberate itself from slavery.
This means a country which denied women and Black people the right to vote could guarantee that right.
This means a country which chose capitalism and free markets could also choose protections for workers, consumers and the environment.
This means a country of diverse views and spiritual beliefs could choose to protect, rather than suppress, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of worship.
This means a country founded on oppressing Native peoples can achieve a more enlightened relationship with tribal nations, respecting tribal sovereignty and keeping sacred treaty promises.
So, as we join together to acknowledge America's 250th birthday, let's find reason to celebrate — but let's be honest about even the darkest chapters of our shared history. Above all, let's recommit ourselves to beginning the next 250 years of America's story on a trajectory for greater equality, freedom and justice for all.
Wado,
Chuck Hoskin Jr.
Principal Chief
