Revisionist and Unexamined Native Narratives
I saw a post recently on social media under the banner of a page calling itself a history resource. It showed a map of the United States with the caption: “Native American land loss in the USA from 1776 to 1930.” I had to laugh because the video used modern-day borders, including those of Mexico and Canada, which is its own quiet irony. The framing, however, is where the real problem lives.
This is important to discuss because details matter. Primarily because the lack of detail opens the door to disinformation. I will start by saying that the post was not, on its face, malicious. However, it was something arguably more dangerous: confidently incomplete or maybe even incompetent. Of course, the response it generated, thousands of reposts and approving comments, illustrates precisely how revisionist history operates in the modern information environment. It does not require fabrication. It only requires a selective starting point and an emotional anchor. Welcome to “disinformation.” Let’s fix it.
The 1776 Problem
Framing Native land loss as an American phenomenon beginning in 1776 erases roughly 250 years of European colonial dispossession that preceded it entirely. Understand that the timeline is not ambiguous. Juan Ponce de León claimed Florida for the Spanish crown in 1513. Jacques Cartier entered the St. Lawrence River valley and claimed the territory for France in 1534. Samuel de Champlain was pushing aggressively into the North American interior by 1603, establishing a French presence deep into what are now the Great Lakes and beyond. René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle descended the entire length of the Mississippi River in 1682 and claimed the whole basin for France, a territorial assertion covering an enormous portion of the continent more than 90 years before American independence.
And let’s be real. Britain was colonizing the eastern seaboard from the early 1600s. Spain held not only Florida but vast territories across the southwest. What I’m saying is that the dispossession, displacement, and destruction of “Indigenous” nations were already well underway, across multiple colonial powers, for generations before the United States was even an idea or existed as a political entity. But this reality is largely omitted from modern narratives, or brushed over as though it doesn’t matter. Well, it does.
To start the clock at 1776 is a rhetorical choice. And, it is, in fact, nonsense. The effect of that choice, whether intentional or not, is to assign responsibility for a continental process to a single nation that inherited it rather than originated it. That’s the problem, but it is also entirely by design. My suspicion is that it is meant to sow the seeds of hate and division.
The Land Was Not Lost
Of course, the framing of “land loss” deserves its own examination. The land was not lost. What the map actually depicts is a systematic process of territorial transfer executed through warfare, voluntary and coerced treaties, legitimate and broken agreements, voluntary and forced removal, and legislative action. Ultimately, the land was “conquered.” Either way, these were deliberate processes with named actors, documented decisions, and legal instruments.
Now, I’m not saying that some of those instruments weren’t fraudulent in practice. Some were. However, that is sort of irrelevant, because by the time the United States was conducting its westward expansion, it was operating from a playbook that European colonial powers had been refining for two centuries. Moreover, it is also a playbook that many of our Founders wanted to change.
Either way, calling the land “lost” or even “stolen” is inaccurate. It introduces passivity where none existed. It distorts and omits important nuance. In other words, it’s lying.
Natives Were Not Native
Not that it matters, because even the term “Native American” is itself inaccurate. The genomic record is clear: America’s oldest ancestors migrated from Northeast Asia. “Native” in the absolute sense is a myth. The designation is accurate only relative to post-1492 arrivals, but is in no way, shape, or form an accurate origin story. And yes, it is absolutely possible to recognize supposed injustices without requiring the false-narrative to rest on inaccurate premises. But let me be clear. Natives are NOT native. They are descendants of Asian migrants. This means that they, too, were on acquired land.
By 1776, the Worst Was Already Done
Perhaps the most consequential distortion in the 1776 framing is what it obscures about pre-Revolutionary history. What most kids are taught is that the demographic collapse of Indigenous populations following European contact is one of the most catastrophic events in human history. They are taught that estimates of pre-contact Native population in North America range from 50 to 100 million, and that the devastation wrought by European disease alone killed entire civilizations.
Fine. But what they don’t seem to teach anymore is that “natives” had been slaughtering each other for thousands of years, and the “white” portion of this story began in the early 1500s, which is also long before most Europeans had even seen the continent’s interior. So, by the time 1776 rolled around, that collapse was already generational. Communities, languages, governance structures, and ways of life had already been destroyed across vast regions, and tribal alliances with Europeans had been well established. The point is that the American republic was born into a continent already completely transformed by European contact, not a pristine landscape it alone proceeded to dispossess. Such framing is simply nonsense.
A Pattern Worth Recognizing
The Native Land Loss video is a great example of a broader pattern in how history gets packaged for social media consumption. The same selective framing appears in discussions of American slavery, where the founding generation is routinely cast as the architects of the institution rather than as the first political class in Western history to formally begin dismantling it. And while I’m tempted, I won’t get into how white slavery preceded black slavery in the Americas by over a hundred years, or how the institution of slavery had existed for thousands of years across virtually every human civilization.
Understand that the American founders, whatever their personal contradictions and struggles, produced the first founding documents in history to contain the ideological seeds of abolition, seeds that bore fruit within 87 years of the nation’s founding. Granted, that context does not alter the fact that North America was conquered. It does, however, change our understanding of what happened and how. Well, the same holds true for other issues related to the “Natives.” For example, an interesting bridge here might be how some “Native” tribes owned thousands of slaves and fought for the Confederacy.
The point is that revisionist history rarely invents events. It selects them. History is messy, and revisionists like to choose a starting point, frame a boundary, and present the result as the complete picture when it is simply not. The map that begins in 1776 is not necessarily wrong about what happened after 1776. It is, however, entirely wrong about what the story actually is. We sometimes call that “lying by omission.”
I just want you to understand that history that begins where the argument is convenient is not history. It is advocacy wearing history’s clothes. It is, in fact, disinformation. And yes, the difference matters, and so does the willingness to say so. My question to you is, do you want to be “right,” or do you want to be accurate?
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