“He has 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.” Among the many grievances the Americans lodged against the British in the Declaration of Independence, one in particular summarizes the hostile viewpoint of the American colonists toward the Native Americans - who, by that point, had intermittently opposed British and American expansion for nearly 150 years. The Indian allies of the defeated French faced an aggressive American migration that defied British directives not to cross the Proclamation Line of 1763, which the British crown set in place to prevent American expansion into the Ohio Valley and encroachment on Indian lands.įighting reignited in this area during the American Revolution as the British and Americans fought for control of the region west of the Appalachian Crest.
#HIDDEN IN THE SAND SERIES#
In the eighteenth century, Indians in western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley found themselves leveraged between the empires of Great Britain and France in a series of wars over control of Canada and the vast region drained by the Ohio River. The Narragansetts, in turn, were subjugated by the English decades later. The war in Virginia was followed closely by warfare in New England against the Pequots, who were nearly obliterated by the English colonists and their Narragansett allies. The war in the Chesapeake represented the first conflict in a nearly unbroken string of warfare between the European and indigenous populations in what ultimately became the United States. The victory secured the English hold on what became the colony of Virginia. The fighting in the Virginia colony was notable for its brutality even in the context of later so-called “Indian Wars,” and resulted in the complete defeat of the Powhatan nation. In the year 1610, nearly a decade before the arrival of that first slave ship in Virginia, the English residents of that colony became engaged in the first of a series of three wars against the Powhatan Indian Confederacy of the Chesapeake Bay region. Its residual effects continue to shape millions of lives, but the harsh reality of that story remains substantially hidden. This narrative is of equal significance to the story of slavery in the creation of the United States. While the importance of slavery’s role in the history, formation and evolution of the United States cannot be overstated, there is another American origin story that predates that of slavery, one that the nation has failed to fully confront. Having just celebrated the nation’s 246th birthday, it seems fitting to reflect on the events and actions that led to the nation’s formation, as well as the consequences of those actions. In the book edition of the project, the authors ask: “What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?” That's when the first transport of African slaves to Virginia in 1619 signaled “the country’s very origin.”
While they have, for the most part, escaped notice, the events at Sand Creek and countless other events in the history of Native Americans in what became the United States intersect in a fundamental way with the 1619 Project and the narrative of slavery in America. The nightmare at Sand Creek has seared the collective consciousness of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations for over a century and a half. On July 11, Professor Gary Roberts, one of the foremost experts on the Sand Creek Massacre, will speak at History Colorado on the massacre, its causes and its outcomes, and its resonance today.
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