It’s impossible to tell the full story of American independence without considering Native Americans. Recent scholarship has shed light on their complex relationship to the Revolution. The rebellion was also “a war over Indian land,” says Philip Deloria, the Saltonstall professor of history and a Native American studies scholar. Some tribes, hoping that American sovereignty would secure their own, joined the Patriots. (Others sided with the British, hoping the king would hold back the colonists’ westward expansion.)
Another reason to ally with the Patriots was religious. Some tribes in the Northeast—especially Massachusetts and Connecticut—had converted to a strand of Protestantism that “leaned more toward the rebellion than the Loyalists,” says anthropologist Cedric Woods, director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “So there’s this other layer connecting the tribes that people don’t think about.” Christian Native leaders, such as Mashpee schoolteacher Reuben Cogenhew, who served as an emissary for George Washington, recruited religiously aligned tribes to the Revolutionary cause.
Those tribes’ contributions to the war were significant. Samuel Ashbow, the son of a Mohegan preacher from Connecticut, died at Bunker Hill—the war’s first Native casualty (his three brothers would also die fighting in the Revolution). The Stockbridge Militia, a primarily Mohican military unit from western Massachusetts, served in some of the most consequential campaigns, beginning with the siege of Boston in 1775. A young Oneida woman named Polly Cooper organized a resupply of George Washington’s starving troops at Valley Forge in 1778. Arriving with Oneida warriors, she brought hundreds of baskets of white corn and taught the Patriot soldiers how to properly cook it.
But in the end, the Revolution was devastating for Indigenous nations, even those allied with the Americans. After being ambushed and massacred by the British in New York in 1778, Stockbridge Militia survivors returned home to find their land taken by colonists; forced to move, they eventually settled in Wisconsin. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which formally recognized the United States, made no provisions for Indigenous allies. “The Revolution ends with white settlers pouring into the Ohio country and the Northwest Indian War,” says Deloria, leading to decades of war and displacement: the War of 1812, Tecumseh’s War, the Seminole Wars, Cherokee removal. “For Native people,” he adds, “the violence and conflict of the Revolution don’t really end. It’s just continuous.”
