Race & Ethnicity

Remembering Indigenous peoples' history during America's 250th

WUWM 89.7 FM | By Jimmy Gutierrez,

Published July 2, 2026 at 3:04 PM CDT

This painting shows Manifest Destiny, the belief in westward expansion of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. It was widely distributed as an engraving called "Spirit of the Frontier". Settlers are moving west, guided and protected by Columbia, aided by modern technology like railroads, and driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. Columbia represents America, dressed in a Roman toga to represent classical republicanism, and brings the enlightened east to the darkened west. — John Gast's 1872 painting *American Progress* illustrates manifest destiny, the idea that American settlers were destined to expand westward — bringing light, technology and "civilization" to "uncivilized" Native peoples.

This week, the U.S. celebrates its 250th birthday. But there's one thing that’s missing among all the festivities: the story of the people who inhabited this continent before colonization — Native Americans.

To reflect on the history of Indigenous people in the U.S., WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez spoke with Simon Moya-Smith, a journalist and member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Smith has written extensively about Indigenous life before colonization, and he reflected on this week's anniversary in a recent piece for The Nation.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Smith shares what life looked like for the Oglala before 1776.

Simon Moya Smith: You were able to hunt the way we used to hunt. We didn't have any of the diseases that we have now, especially things like diabetes, cancer, etc. — things like that. We didn't have prisons. If you messed up, you could just be banished. But you never wanted to mess up, because your name would change, at least for the Oglala. You got a name when you were born, and then your name would change based on your honor or dishonor.

Jimmy Gutierrez: Are there other ways Oglala society differed from the colonized society?

We had freedom when it came to homosexuality. We had the men's counsel, the women's counsel, and Two-Spirit counsels. To be Two-Spirit, gay or queer was to be a blessing, not an abomination. Women had a lot more freedom, in the sense that we were matrilineal. We're still matrilineal. A lot of nations and tribes are.

When it comes to the history of this country, how were Indigenous people talked about and viewed at the time?

The Declaration of Independence literally refers to Indigenous people as “merciless Indian savages.” They don't teach that in school, but this isn't conjecture. Just read a couple paragraphs down and see that it demonizes the Indigenous people. The president of the United States, George Washington, his philosophy was that the best way to kill Indigenous people was to kill our crops. If you kill the crops, you kill the people, you kill the children, you kill the elders, you kill the warriors, the men, etc. So that's what he decided was the best approach.

And he's not exactly a founding father, but Abraham Lincoln still holds the record for hanging the most Natives in a single day. Thomas Jefferson was a founding father, and he believed that we “justified our own extermination,” just from us being here. Those were his words. And then that kind of mentality passes on. You see that in Westerns with John Wayne. When somebody interviewed him and said, “Sir, you're always killing Native Americans in your movies. Do you have a problem with Native Americans?” And he said, “Well, it's their fault for being on our land when we got here.”