Come Sit In The Grass - America's 250th

On celebrating this country with the whole truth!

I grew up on Lopez Island, a small place in the San Juan Islands in Washington State where the summer population explodes and half the island seems to know your name by August. The Fourth of July was the best day of the year. A parade came down the middle of the island, tractors and kids on decorated bikes and somebody’s grandmother waving from the back of a convertible. Every yard had a barbecue going. After dark, out over the water, we got one of the best fireworks shows in the Pacific Northwest, every shell homemade by a crew of local volunteers, some of whom had trained under master pyrotechnicians in Japan. Thousands of us would sit in the grass and gasp at the same moments, and for a few hours a small rural island full of people from every kind and way of life felt like one. I loved it completely, and I love it still.

What took me years to hold in the same hand as that joy is this. I am an enrolled citizen of the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians, and the holiday I loved so much celebrates a document that, a few lines below “all men are created equal,” calls my ancestors “merciless Indian Savages.” The phrase sits in the Declaration of Independence, in the last of its grievances against the king. Both of those things are true at once: the fireworks were beautiful, and the founding paper of this country called my people savages.

I am careful with the word love when it comes to this country. Love asks for a loyalty I am not sure I owe a place that spent so long trying to erase people like me. What I can say is that I celebrate it, and I celebrate all of it, the fireworks and the grievance and everything that came after, held in the same two hands. That is the only honest way I know to stand on a day like this.

I am not the first person to stand inside that contradiction. In 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to give a Fourth of July address and delivered it on the fifth instead. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” he told the crowd. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.” For the better part of an hour he laid out the cruelty of slavery in a country that called itself the land of the free. And then, near the end, he said the part people tend to leave out: “I do not despair of this country.” He carried the grief and the hope together in one speech and never let either one cancel the other.

There is a bitter footnote to Douglass this year. When the U.S. Mint designed its commemorative quarters for the 250th, one honored the end of slavery and carried his face, and that design was quietly set aside before it ever reached a single pocket. One Native figure did make it onto a 2026 coin. Her name was Polly Cooper.

In the winter that Washington’s army lay starving and freezing at Valley Forge, the Oneida Nation sent help. Cooper, an Oneida woman, walked hundreds of miles from her homeland in what is now upstate New York, carrying white corn to men who were dying of hunger. She stayed through the cold and taught the soldiers how to cook it, because prepared the wrong way it would swell inside them and kill them. When they offered to pay her, she would not take the money. The Oneida were among the first allies this country ever had, and close to a third of their people died in the war they helped win. When it ended, the young nation and the state of New York took most of their land anyway. Native people helped build this place and were erased from it in the same breath. And still, two hundred fifty years on, there is Polly Cooper’s face on a coin, a basket of corn in her hands, honored at last for a kindness the country spent centuries trying to forget.

When this country does try to account for that history, it tends to do it in a whisper. In December of 2009, the United States government issued a formal apology to Native peoples. You have most likely never heard of it, and that is exactly the problem. It came with no ceremony. No tribal leaders were in the room to receive it, and the president who signed it never read a word of it aloud. It was slipped into a defense spending bill, a few pages past the military budget, carrying a clause that guaranteed the apology could never be used against the government in court. The Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier read it and was stopped cold by everything it refused to say, so she wrote a book back to it. In WHEREAS, she takes the government’s own bloodless language, that long procession of “whereas” clauses turning massacres into “conflicts” and treaty-breaking into paperwork, and works it over until the evasion shows through. Her case is hard to shake. An apology no one hears, worded so carefully that it costs the government nothing, is only cover, a way for everyone to move along without changing a thing.

For me, all of it comes to a head in Colorado, where I live. This year the state turns 150 while the country turns 250, two birthdays stacked on top of each other. Colorado became a state in 1876. Twelve years earlier, its territorial governor had authorized ordinary citizens to hunt down Native people and take whatever they owned, and that same year a militia fell on a peaceful camp flying an American flag and a flag of truce and killed and mutilated more than a hundred and fifty Cheyenne and Arapaho, the majority of them women and children. Those orders stayed on the books, never formally revoked, until 2021, well inside my lifetime and likely yours. And 1876 carried one more mark. That summer, up in Montana Territory, Lakota and Cheyenne fighters overwhelmed George Custer’s cavalry at the Little Bighorn, the battle they know as Greasy Grass. The new state and that battle both turn 150 this year, and only one of the two tends to get a parade.

I could fill this whole essay with that kind of history and every line would hold up. What pulls at me harder is the fact the fireworks were always pointing toward: the people who lived through all of it are still here, and we are ready to help run the place.

You can watch that starting to happen. Two days ago, on Colorado’s primary night, Consuelo Redhorse, who is Navajo, narrowly won her Democratic primary in a state House district that runs from west of Denver up to the Wyoming line, and Gabriel Cervantes, a descendant of the Coahuiltecan and Nahua peoples, won his in a district just north of the city. Both are likely on their way to the state Capitol this fall. Nearby, Denver voters will decide in April of 2027 if they will elect two Natives to serve on City Council. Kristina Bad Hand, who is Sicangu Lakota, is running for an At-Large Seat, and myself who is running for the District 8 seat.

The knowledge this country came closest to destroying is the knowledge it now needs most. Nations governed this continent for thousands of years by thinking in generations, by understanding the land and everything living on it as kin they would have to answer to. Picture a government that judged a decision by whether the river would still run clean for a child born seven generations from now. Picture leaders who held a promise as sacred, having spent four centuries on the wrong end of broken ones. It shows up in practical ways, too. When the West burns every summer, agencies are turning back to the controlled burns that Native nations tended for generations. Where a river is dying, the people who know how to bring it back are often the descendants of those once arrested for praying on its banks. This is hard-won competence, standing right here, ready, waiting only for the country to make room at the head of the table.

I still celebrate the Fourth of July. I love the smoke off the barbecue and the little kids on their decorated bikes and the homemade fireworks climbing over the water while strangers sit hip to hip in the dark, proud to share one unlikely country. What I want now is for the day to grow big enough to hold all of it at once: the fireworks and that twenty-seventh grievance, Polly Cooper’s corn and the land her people never got back, the apology buried where no one would find it, and the future we are still owed. Douglass did not despair of this country. Neither do I.

Those fireworks on Lopez came out of a shed on the island, built by our own neighbors, a little better every year, and sent up over all our heads. A country gets built the same way, by hand, except the making of this one ran on stolen land and broken promises, on the graves of massacres and the silence of boarding schools, and no burst of fireworks should be allowed to paper over that. And yet the same fact that breaks my heart is the one that leaves me hopeful. Whatever human hands have made, human hands can tear down and remake. My people have been building on this continent since long before there was a July to celebrate, and we are still here, still building, ready to help turn this country into something that would finally deserve its own fireworks.

This Fourth of July is yours. It is mine, too. Come sit in the grass. There’s plenty of room.