Rebecca Nagle Launches 1st 'First America' Podcast, Challenging 250-Year US Founding Story
Updated
Updated · Democracy Now! · Jun 30
Rebecca Nagle Launches 1st 'First America' Podcast, Challenging 250-Year US Founding Story
1 articles · Updated · Democracy Now! · Jun 30
Summary
Ahead of the July 4 250th anniversary, Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle debuted “First America,” a documentary podcast arguing the Declaration of Independence itself undercuts the standard Revolution narrative.
Episode 1 centers on the Declaration’s final grievance—calling Native people “merciless Indian savages”—which Nagle says shows the founders’ deepest anger was directed at Indigenous people, not simply taxes and representation.
The series, made with Indigenous scholars, traces how doctrines used to dispossess Native nations still shape executive power, immigration, citizenship, territorial expansion and foreign policy.
Nagle argues those structures link past and present, pointing to ICE enforcement at Fort Snelling—once a Dakota concentration camp site—as evidence that coercive practices long used against Native people still echo in US government today.
Her broader claim is that the founders built both a democracy and an empire, and that unresolved imperial powers now help explain today’s authoritarian drift in the United States.