Excerpt: The past several decades of scholarship offer two powerful themes touching on the relationship between the American Revolution and indigenous peoples. The first holds that on the eve of revolution, ordinary European settlers were already American Indians’ greatest danger, a danger only to be restrained by indigenous action, imperial intervention, or both. The second closely allied theme holds that the American Revolution greatly advanced Indian dispossession. These story lines weave a narrative that begins in the 1760s, when financially strapped Great Britain, facing powerful Indian resistance to British claims of conquest, extended meaningful protection to Native Americans from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Settlers, locally oriented in politics and anti-Indian in sentiment, scrapped such imperial plans, often by murdering Indians, precipitating war. Metropolitan officials and appointees endeavored to regulate expansion, commerce, and violence. They offered coexistence and prospective subjecthood to Indians. The American Revolution dashed this incipient accommodation. It unleashed land-seeking, racist, backcountry men backed by a responsive government. Overthrowing an empire of graded rank in favor of a white settlers’ republic, the Revolution endangered Native America.
