Opinion/New Writings
The Declaration of Independence from a Wabanaki Perspective
Abbe Museum panel — August 22, 2026
By Donna Loring
When I read the Declaration of Independence, I am reminded of another document.
It was written in 1833 by leaders of the Penobscot Nation and sent to the Maine State Legislature. It was a Remonstrance—a formal statement of grievances concerning the taking of four townships from the Penobscot people.
There is something striking about placing these two documents beside one another.
The colonists wrote down the wrongs they believed had been committed against them by the British Crown. The Penobscot people wrote down the wrongs they believed had been committed against them by the State of Maine.
Both were articulating grievances against a government they believed had abused its power.
And both appealed to that government for redress.
The British Crown did not provide the redress the colonists sought. More than half a century later, the Maine Legislature chose not to provide the redress the Penobscot sought.
That is one reason the Declaration of Independence strikes me as a timeless document. When I read its grievances, many concern abuses of governmental power that people could articulate in different forms today.
But there is one grievance that we, as Wabanaki people, cannot claim as our own.
The 27th grievance charges King George III with attempting to bring upon the colonists:
“the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Those words change the document for me.
The Declaration speaks eloquently about liberty while describing the original people of this land as “merciless Indian Savages.”
And these were some of the same Native people whom the colonists had recently approached as potential allies in their struggle against Britain.
We were not simply forgotten.
We were named. And we were named as the enemy.
The authors did not merely leave the original people of this land outside the promises they were making for themselves. They placed us outside by dehumanizing us.
That language made us foreigners in our own homeland.
And I believe it helped establish a pattern that would have profound consequences over the next 250 years.
Before “Merciless Indian Savages”
But the Declaration did not invent this way of thinking.
To understand where those words came from, we need to look at the colonial world that produced them.
Long before 1776, Europeans had developed religious and legal justifications for taking possession of lands occupied by non-Christian peoples. Papal decrees provided authority that became part of what we now call the Doctrine of Discovery. Those ideas crossed the Atlantic with European colonization and eventually found their way into American law.
Here in what is now Maine, we can see what that worldview looked like on the ground.
Reverend Thomas Smith, founder of the First Parish Church in Portland, kept a diary for much of the eighteenth century. His entries provide an extraordinary window into colonial society—church affairs, settlement, land, warfare and relations with Native people.
On Sunday, September 19, 1745, Reverend Smith recorded the government’s bounty for Indian scalps. He then wrote:
“People seem wonderfully spirited to go out after the Indians.”
I have often imagined that scene.
I imagine this man of God finishing that sentence in his journal.
He puts down his feather pen.
He picks up his Bible.
He walks out to meet the congregation assembled for Sunday service.
A parishioner shakes his hand and says, “Good morning, Reverend Smith.”
He steps into the pulpit, opens his Bible and begins his sermon:
Love thy neighbor.
That contradiction matters.
Because taking Native land required more than soldiers.
It required justification.
If Native people could be defined as savages, killing them became easier to justify.
Taking their land became easier to justify.
Ignoring their political rights became easier to justify.
And eventually excluding them from the promises of a new nation became easier to justify.
Then, on June 18, 1757, Reverend Smith recorded receiving 198 pounds as:
“My part of scalp money.”
Think about that.
A Christian minister could receive money connected to the killing of Native people and record it in his diary.
The violence was certainly not one-sided. Wabanaki people fought back. But they were fighting in defense of homelands, families, resources and ways of life that were increasingly under pressure from colonial expansion.
The land contained timber, fish, fur-bearing animals and other resources of enormous value.
Land speculators wanted it.
Settlers wanted it.
Governments wanted it.
Treaties were negotiated. Conferences were held. Agreements were reached.
And still the land continued to disappear.
So when Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress used the words “merciless Indian Savages” in 1776, they were drawing upon a way of seeing Native people that had existed for generations.
The Declaration did not create that worldview.
It carried that worldview into one of the founding documents of the United States.
From “Savages” to Sovereignty
Then something important happens.
The language changes.
The question becomes not simply who are these Native people?
It becomes: What political rights do their Nations possess?
In his first annual message to Congress in 1829, President Andrew Jackson argued against the existence of independent Native governments within the boundaries of the states.
And remarkably, he chose Maine and the Penobscot Nation to make his point.
Jackson asked:
“Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State?”
Think about what had happened in just over fifty years.
During the Revolution, Wabanaki people had been sought as military allies.
In the Declaration, Native people were described as merciless savages.
By 1829, the President of the United States was using the Penobscot Nation as an example in an argument against independent Native political authority within a state.
The following year came the Indian Removal Act.
And then, only four years after Jackson’s address, Penobscot leaders sent their 1833 Remonstrance to the Maine Legislature.
They were saying, in effect:
You have wronged us.
They protested what had happened to the four townships and appealed to Maine for justice.
That brings me back to where I began.
The Declaration was a statement of grievances.
The Penobscot Remonstrance was a statement of grievances.
The colonists believed a distant government was taking away their rights.
The Penobscot believed the government that had grown up around them was taking away theirs.
There is a profound irony in that.
Paper Chains
This conflict did not end with Jackson.
It moved into American law.
The Marshall Court decisions of the nineteenth century created legal doctrines that profoundly restricted Native control over ancestral lands and defined Tribal Nations through concepts of dependency and federal guardianship.
The government recognized Tribal Nations when recognition served its purposes. Treaties themselves required recognition of another political entity with whom an agreement could be made.
But the United States was also expanding across a continent occupied by those same Native Nations.
Law became one of the ways that contradiction was resolved.
I have called these laws paper chains.
They were not iron shackles.
They were words written on paper.
But those words could control land.
They could restrict jurisdiction.
They could determine political status.
They could limit economic independence.
And they could be extraordinarily difficult to break.
That history has particular meaning here in Maine.
We have repeatedly heard versions of the same argument Jackson made in 1829—that there cannot be an independent political entity within the State of Maine. (No Nation within a Nation).
The language changes from generation to generation.
But underneath it is the same fundamental question:
Who has the right to define the political existence of the Wabanaki Nations?
Is our sovereignty inherent?
Or does it exist only to the extent that another government is willing to recognize it?
For Wabanaki people, that is not a hypothetical constitutional question.
It affects our lands, our natural resources, our governments and our ability to build economically sustainable communities.
The Foundation
And so I return to the Declaration of Independence.
I don’t believe there is anything useful in pretending that the Declaration has no value.
Its articulation of grievances against arbitrary government has endured for 250 years because there is something powerful in it.
The idea that people have a right to confront a government that abuses its authority is powerful.
The Penobscot leaders who wrote the 1833 Remonstrance understood that principle very well.
But we cannot celebrate the Declaration’s language of liberty while stepping around the people it explicitly dehumanized.
The phrase “merciless Indian Savages” did not disappear when the ink dried.
The worldview behind those words continued through land policies, removal, assimilation, court decisions and governmental attempts to diminish Tribal political authority.
And yet we did not disappear.
The Wabanaki Nations are still here.
That is why examining the Declaration from a Wabanaki perspective during this 250th anniversary is so important.
We are not asking to be inserted into someone else’s history.
We were already here when that history was being made.
The United States built its political structure on a foundation that excluded the original people of this land—not simply by forgetting us, but by defining us as an obstacle to the new nation being created.
To leave the original people of this land out served to create a weak foundation.
At one time I might have said that such a structure needed to be torn down and rebuilt from the beginning.
I no longer believe that is necessarily true.
A weak foundation can be strengthened.
But it has to be done carefully and correctly.
First, you have to expose the weakness.
You have to acknowledge what was done.
You have to listen to the people who were excluded.
And then you have to repair the structure in a way that does not simply cover over the original fault.
Perhaps that is one of the responsibilities of this 250th anniversary.
Not to erase the Declaration.
Not to condemn everything it represents.
And certainly not to idolize it.
But to read the whole document—including the words that have been so easy to pass over—and understand what those words meant to the people who were already here.
Because 250 years later, the question is no longer simply what kind of country the founders intended to create.
The question for all of us is:
What kind of country are we willing to build upon the foundation they left us?
See images and more from the panel here.
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