Two hundred and fifty years on, the US and its citizens are celebrating the Declaration of Independence. Hardly anyone reads it carefully. I’d ask you to. Read the thing. Because when you actually read the charges the colonists filed against the King of England – the facts, as they put it, submitted to a candid world – you find a list of grievances that the United States would go on to commit itself, for two and a half centuries, and on a scale their King never imagined.
They accused the King of maintaining standing armies among them, in peacetime, without their consent. The United States maintains them all over the planet. They accused him of cutting off all their trade, of fundamentally altering the forms of their government. The United States builds blockades and installs foreign governments. You can read the Declaration of Independence as a mirror.
And there is only one people named in that document. It’s not “the people.” It’s us, Native people. The final, climactic grievance against the King is that he 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.”
Sit with that phrase. An undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. Then look at what the men behind that revolution did. Three years later, in 1779, George Washington ordered a general to march on the Haudenosaunee – my people – with instructions that read like a confession.
The objectives of the expedition, Washington wrote, were “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.” And he was explicit that no compromise was to be accepted. “You will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.”
The army carried out those orders. More than forty Haudenosaunee towns were burned, along with at least 160,000 bushels of corn and the expansive orchards that had fed us for generations. An estimated 5,000 Haudenosaunee fled in desperation toward Fort Niagara, many dying of starvation and cold.
This was quite literally terrorism by design. Terrorism, by definition, is violence deliberately targeting civilians, instilling fear for a political objective. Washington wrote that “future security” depended on “the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.” He wanted, once he broke the Haudenosaunee, “to draw further advantages from their fears.”
For this, my people gave Washington a special epithet, Rahnatakaias or Town Destroyer. It means much more than a simple demolisher of homes. It means a senseless tearer away of flesh, like a rabid dog or even a shark. We Haudenosaunee have used that name for every president since.
So when I read “undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions,” I know exactly whose rule of warfare that describes. It was written down as an accusation by the very people who were about to make it their policy.
But notice this. The Declaration of Independence is barely a declaration of independence at all. Only a small part of it actually discusses independence. It never says how the independent government will be structured, or how a free people should live alongside others. It is mostly a catalog of grievances and a declaration of war. And in part, the war it declared was against the “merciless Indian Savages.”
We Haudenosaunee made a different kind of declaration, long before the United States. It is actually about independence, and accuses no one. We call it the Tiohateh, or Two Row Wampum.
In the Tiohateh, two rows of purple wampum run parallel across a field of white wampum. The purple rows represent two paths running side by side. One is ours, our people, our ways. The other is another people’s. It is a covenant of mutual respect, originally made with fellow Native nations and all of creation, really.
Originally published in the Two Row Times, September 9, 2026 (Volume 14, Issue 4), page 6.
