Band Member Voices
June Culture Column - 250 YEARS OF U.S. OCCUPATION
By Nazhike, Mille Lacs Band Member
As Anishinaabe, we have learned about our migration west to the land where the food grows on water. It was a prophecy of hardships yet to come. The Manidoog ensured someone had the vision and that our ancestors faith was strong enough to follow those dreams and leave the lands behind.
In July 2026, the United States will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Across the country there will be celebrations, reflections, patriotic speeches, and reminders of the ideals this nation claims to represent: freedom, liberty, and democracy. For Indigenous people, this anniversary carries another truth alongside it. The foundation of the United States was not built on empty lands or mutual agreements. It was built through colonization justified by a worldview that declared Indigenous peoples spiritually and politically interior on our own homelands.
Long before the United States even existed, European powers were already developing legal and religious frameworks to justify expansion into "non-Christian" spaces. One of the most influential ideas came through what became known as the Doctrine of Discovery. In simple terms, Christian leadership declared that lands occupied by non-Christians could be claimed by Christian nations. Indigenous peoples were recognized as existing yet not as fully sovereign in the eyes of European powers. This philosophy became World Law which was then used on many indigenous and other non-Christian groups to lose land through other Nation's Laws throughout this planet.
The idea traveled from Papal Decrees into European Law, then into colonial systems, and eventually into the legal foundations of the United States itself. In the 1800s, U.S. Supreme Court decisions adopted versions of this thinking by arguing that European "discovery" gave colonial governments title to Indigenous lands while tribes retained only limited rights of occupancy. Imagine entire nations with governments, trade systems, spiritual practices, and relationships to the land older than most European states suddenly reduced to occupants because they prayed differently.
As Anishinaabe people, this history matters because colonization was about replacing an entire way of understanding the world. Our ancestors viewed land as a relationship and a responsibility to honor those Manidoog that provide for us. European colonial systems viewed land as property to be claimed, divided and extracted for wealth. Those two worldviews collided and one came backed by armies, churches, laws and economic systems that justified domination in the name of civilization.
The effects are still visible today. Reservation boundaries, boarding schools, language and culture loss, and disrupted community systems did not happen accidentally. They are the continuation of a belief that Indigenous ways of life were obstacles to progress rather than civilizations worthy of respect. Even now, many Americans celebrate the growth of the country without understanding what had to be dismantled for that growth to occur.
Today, 250 years later, Indigenous nations are still here. Our languages still carry knowledge older than the United States itself, our ceremonies continue, our treaties remain living agreements, and our people continue practicing what colonization attempted to erase. That reality complicates the national celebration in an important way. It reminds the world that the history of America is not a story of independence but is a story of occupation, displacement and genocide.
The 250th anniversary of the United States should not only ask Americans to celebrate where the country has been. It should ask them to confront honestly how the nation was built, whose lands made it possible and what ways of life were attempted to be stripped yet remain today. Migwech.
