Quote · Empire: World History
374. Ken Burns on the American Revolution and Empire
Where this was said
Native Nations as Geopolitical Equals
At 13:51 · chapter starts 13:00
The film's opening sentence, Burns reveals, acknowledges that the Revolution engaged more than two dozen nations — European as well as Native American. [1] — Ken Burns "For 150 years before the Revolution, Native American nations were active economic, military, and diplomatic players on a world stage. They …" 12:55 This is not a courtesy gesture. For 150 years before the Revolution, many Native nations had been economic, military, and diplomatic players on the world stage, visiting London, Paris, and Madrid. Burns is emphatic: a tribe like the Shawnee was geopolitically as significant as the colony of Massachusetts, Virginia, England, or France. Treating Native peoples as a single undifferentiated mass is as absurd as treating all Europeans as one thing — they have distinct identities, centuries and millennia old. The Europeans arriving in North America have seven or eight generations of continental experience; the Native peoples they encounter have 600 or 700. Failing to extend proper historical dimensions to Native Americans, Burns argues, is the foundational distortion of American history.
American schoolchildren know Washington as the father of the nation. The Haudenosaunee knew him as the Town Destroyer. Washington ordered General Sullivan to raze 40 to 50 Native American towns in upstate New York — a scouting expedition for future white settlement.
