In 2026, politicians, corporations, and institutions across the United States will celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. We will be told to honor the founding colonizers, wave flags, and participate in a carefully curated story of freedom, democracy, and progress.
But for many people, there is another story.
The United States was not born on empty land. It emerged from centuries of settler colonialism, Indigenous displacement, genocide, slavery, land theft, and racial capitalism. The same founding generation that spoke eloquently about liberty also built a society that denied freedom to Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, women, poor people, and anyone who fell outside their narrow vision of political belonging.
The mythology surrounding the nation’s founding often obscures how the founders themselves viewed the Indigenous nations whose lands they sought to control. The Declaration of Independence itself contains one of the most famous examples, accusing King George III of unleashing “the merciless Indian Savages” against the colonies.
These words were not simply rhetoric. They helped justify policies of expansion and conquest. By portraying Indigenous peoples as inherently violent or uncivilized, colonial leaders created a moral framework for seizing land, breaking treaties, and waging war against Native nations.
The contradiction runs through the nation’s founding documents. While proclaiming that “all men are created equal,” many of the signers enslaved human beings. While demanding self-determination from Britain, colonial settlers denied the sovereignty of Indigenous nations. While championing liberty, they built an economy dependent upon slavery, trafficking, and territorial expansion.
Every advance in justice has come not from the generosity of those in power, but from generations of people who organized, rebelled, resisted, and imagined a different world.
Indigenous nations survived campaigns of removal, warfare, boarding schools, and cultural erasure. They defended their lands, preserved their languages, maintained their traditions, and continue to fight for sovereignty and self-determination today.
Enslaved Africans resisted at every stage of slavery. They escaped, revolted, sabotaged plantations, built maroon communities, preserved cultural traditions, and struggled for liberation.
Workers organized unions in factories, mines, farms, and fields. Women fought for political participation, reproductive autonomy, labor rights, and freedom from patriarchal violence. Immigrants built communities while confronting exclusion, detention, and xenophobia. Disabled people demanded dignity. LGBTQ+ people challenged criminalization and social exclusion. Civil rights organizers confronted segregation, voter suppression, and white supremacy.
The history of the United States is therefore not simply the history of presidents, generals, and founders. It is the history of ordinary people refusing to accept the system as it was.
These struggles produced cultures of resistance that continue today. At 250 years, the question is not whether the United States deserves celebration. The more important question is what, exactly, is being celebrated.
If we celebrate only the colonial founding, we celebrate a morally wrong and sanitized history. If we celebrate only military victories and national expansion, we erase the people who paid the price for that expansion.
But if we honor the generations who resisted conquest, slavery, exploitation, and exclusion, we tell a different story.
The United States at 250 is not merely a nation founded in revolution. It is also a nation shaped by centuries of struggle against the inequalities embedded in its founding.
The future will not be determined by the myths we inherit. It will be determined by what we choose to build next.
As we mark 250 years of this colonial project, we should remember not only the architects of power, but the generations who challenged it, and the generations who continue to.
The most meaningful way to honor the past is not through celebration alone. It is through continuing the unfinished work of justice everywhere.
See Amy Goodman’s interview with Rebecca Nagle for more.
