Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 69

Native Americans were another group the founders did not consider to be prospective citizens. Not only were they already considered members of their own sovereign nations, but their communal property holding, their nonmonarchical political systems, and their divisions of labor between women working in the fields and men hunting for game were not compatible with European political notions. Pushed farther and farther west by land-hungry colonists, the Indians were actively hostile to the American cause in the Revolution. Knowing this, the British hoped to gain their allegiance in the war. Fortunately for the revolutionary effort, the colonists, having asked in vain for the Indians to stay out of what they called a “family quarrel,” were able to suppress early on the Indians’ attempts to get revenge for their treatment at the hands of the settlers.¹² There was certainly no suggestion that the claim of equality at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence might include the peoples who had lived on the continent for centuries before the white man arrived.