Category: Washington Post

McKaylin Peters, a 24-year-old Native American graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, still recalls when she first heard the words “merciless Indian savages.”

Sitting in social studies class at her predominantly White middle school near Green Bay, Wisc. — a school that once used an image of an Indian as its mascot — she cringed when the teacher read a passage deep in the Declaration of Independence: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Peters said she and the six other Native students in the class looked quietly at one another.

“I was upset. It just rolled off her tongue very easily,” recalled Peters, a citizen of the Menominee Nation who is getting her master’s in organizational leadership. “It seemed like no one else was shocked except for us, the Indigenous students in the classroom. We were like, ‘Did she really just say that?’”

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration — a document fundamental to the nation’s founding and still revered — Peters and other Native American scholars and tribal leaders are reflecting on the Founding Fathers’ use of the derogatory description for Indigenous people in 1776. Many note that while the Declaration promises that “all men are created equal,” its ideals were not extended to everyone.

The document’s portrayal of Indigenous people helped establish a moral and legal framework that justified decades of devastating U.S. policies toward Native communities, according to historians. Celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing come amid a striking contrast: Native tribes are working to reclaim ancestral lands, revive lost languages, and preserve cultural traditions, while the Trump administration has sought to remove or downplay references to slavery, Native dispossession, and other dark chapters of U.S. history in parks and museums and on government websites.

“It’s not just a line in an old document,” Peters said. “It’s a reminder that this country was built by declaring us less than human. When the Declaration of Independence calls us that, it’s a message that Native youth sadly still hear today in classrooms, policy debates, and in how society talks about us.”

Many historians and Indigenous historians say the term “savages” did more than reflect 18th-century attitudes. It helped perpetuate stereotypes of Native Americans and contributed to their marginalization; centuries later, it adds to feelings, especially for Native youths, of being excluded from America’s national story. A 2022 study by Texas A&M University researchers found that the Declaration’s pejorative reference to Native Americans helped normalize a view of them as threats rather than as sovereign nations and peoples with rights.

For many Native people, the meaning — and impact — of the phrase is emotional and complicated.

Some discover the wording as adults and are appalled. Others see it as a reminder of racist attitudes and centuries of broken treaties, land theft, and forced assimilation. Some young people have reclaimed the epithet, debating it on social media and displaying it on T-shirts and tattoos as a symbol of resilience and empowerment. An Indigenous-led heavy metal band intentionally used the phrase as its name.

“It’s become sort of an ironic touchstone,” said Kevin Gover, the Smithsonian Institution’s undersecretary for museums and culture. A citizen of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, Gover said he did not encounter the term until middle age. After his initial outrage, Gover said, he responded as many Native people do: by mocking it.

“Even we, on the side of the descendants of those who were victimized, have to take a nuanced view,” said Gover, who is also the former director of the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C. “In many respects, it’s a badge of pride that our ancestors had the wherewithal to survive and allow us to be alive in this time.

“We can acknowledge the wrong,” he said, “and be grateful for our ancestors’ fortitude.”

Hartman Deetz, an enrolled member of the Mashpee Wampanoag — the Massachusetts tribe that famously helped the Pilgrims survive their first Thanksgiving in 1621 — said the wording reflects the opposite of how Indigenous people treated white settlers.

“They were fed when they were starving, given hospitality by us, but they treated us in a way that was savage and merciless in the dispossession of our homelands,” said Deetz, who served as a consultant for an exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia about the Declaration and the history behind it. “It was framed in a way that justified the treatment they brought upon us, and it continues to this day in attempts to sell our sacred sites for copper mines and to drill for oil and mining on our lands.

“The colonial enterprise hasn’t stopped,” he said. “There’s such a disregard for Natives to exist or have rights of where we do exist. That’s the legacy of these words.”

The words originated in an early draft of the Virginia Constitution written by Thomas Jefferson, who later included it in the Declaration of Independence, which Congress adopted.

Ironically, some historians say, the characterization of Native people contradicts Jefferson’s own views. In Notes on the State of Virginia, a book Jefferson wrote that laid out many of his views on race, government, and religious freedoms, he was “very sympathetic to Native people,” said Kevin Butterfield, a historian at the Library of Congress. Jefferson described Indigenous people as just, honorable and noble — a sharp contrast to the widespread European belief that Indigenous people were inferior.

But Jefferson understood the Declaration was political rhetoric — a kind of “public relations piece,” said Butterfield, who is the acting chief of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. He placed it near the end to bolster the case for independence.

“He’s trying to paint the worst possible picture of how the king is approaching his interactions with the American colonists,” Butterfield said. “So he’s laying out horrible wartime atrocities from the Revolutionary War.”

The description reflected colonial attitudes and the realities of frontier warfare, scholars say. Colonists were hostile toward Native Americans, who were powerful political and military figures and, just like other nations, protecting their sovereignty. Some Native nations had allied with the British — a move that many settlers resented — and many colonists also opposed King George III’s Proclamation of 1763, which barred settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Repeated violence between Indigenous people and settlers also helped shape the ideology behind the description, including the French and Indian War and Dunmore’s War in 1774, when Virginia colonists fought the Shawnee and Mingo to expand into the Ohio Valley, according to historians. In the summer of 1776, as the Declaration was drafted and adopted, a lesser-known conflict unfolded when Cherokee warriors attacked frontier settlements across parts of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Colonists responded by burning more than 50 Cherokee towns and driving Native people from their homes.

By 1776, the Founding Fathers “understood their need to accuse the king of what they considered the ultimate crime — partnering with Indigenous peoples and arming them,” said Ned Blackhawk, a Native American author and Yale University historian. “So they created this vilification in the Declaration that, in many ways, was at odds with their experience of living alongside Natives for generations.”

The rhetoric was part of a broader racial ideology taking shape during the Revolutionary era, said Blackhawk, an enrolled member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada.

“They were deeply committed to Enlightenment principles, but those were restricted to people similar to themselves,” he said. “Native Americans became a foil in simplified and racialized ways.”

Tracy L. Canard Goodluck, executive director of the Center for Native American Youth at the Aspen Institute, said she is disappointed the term is either glossed over or not taught in many school curriculums, its impact not discussed.

It wasn’t until she was a student at Dartmouth College, she said, that she fully understood the context of the description. She was angry, but the new knowledge also awakened in her a passion for educating others about Indigenous history and mistreatment. Goodluck, a member of the Oneida Nation who is also Mvskoke Creek, said in her previous work as a teacher in Seattle and Albuquerque she taught about Indigenous people and the harsh characterization in the Declaration.

“It shouldn’t just be about white history,” she said. “It should be about all history — the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

She said it’s also important to educate the public, so every Fourth of July, she wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase from the Declaration.

“Those words served the purpose back then as a way to dehumanize Native people in this country,” said Goodluck. “We need to change that narrative. We’re still here. We’re doctors, lawyers, teachers and political leaders.

“I am that merciless Indian savage who my ancestors prayed for to do great things.”

Russia’s war in Ukraine is stalling — on the battlefield and in the corridors of diplomacy.

For months, high-ranking Russian officials insisted that a path to ending the war in Ukraine — largely on Moscow’s maximalist terms — had been decided at a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump last August in Anchorage. Only Ukraine’s intransigence stood as an obstacle.

But that narrative has unraveled — perhaps because the only way to get the United States to help broker a new deal is admitting there never was a previous one.

In recent days, three top Russian officials accused the White House of not honoring the Alaska agreement. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov even speculated that the summit was a U.S. “ploy to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, pushed back. “If there had been an agreement, we would have had an end of the war,” Rubio told reporters.

“Russia wants the entirety of Donetsk to be turned over to them, among some other things,” he said, explaining Russia’s demand for more Ukrainian territory.

After days of back-and-forth, Putin conceded the point, saying on Sunday that “there were indeed no agreements reached in Anchorage.”

“The spirit of Anchorage — although it wasn’t expressed in any formal documents, and no one put any signatures down — in Anchorage we discussed certain possibilities for ending the crisis in Ukraine,” Putin told a state television reporter Sunday. “And the compromises discussed were precisely the proposals the American side made to us.”

The contradictions started in Alaska immediately after the summit. Putin said an agreement that will “pave the path toward peace in Ukraine” was reached, while Trump said that while the meeting was “extremely productive … there’s no deal until there’s a deal.” Trump also told Fox News afterward that it was “up to Zelensky” now to get a deal done, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Russian leader’s decision now effectively to bury the Alaska summit, which the Kremlin and its propagandists had mythologized as a turning point, comes as Russian forces are largely stalled on the battlefield in Ukraine — a sharp change from the previous four summers when they made gains.

Instead, the skies over Russia and the Ukrainian territory it occupies are increasingly crowded with advanced Ukrainian drones, signaling a new phase in which Russia is playing technological catch-up and regular Russian citizens are feeling the war intrude on their lives with gasoline shortages and disruptions to summer travel, including to occupied Crimea.

Russian political analysts have interpreted the indirect spat between Rubio and Lavrov over the alleged deal as a sign that Ukraine has convinced Trump it can keep fighting — and that it can pose a serious threat to Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, rather than surrendering the Donbas region, as Russia has demanded.

Trump probably arrived in Anchorage believing that Ukraine’s defeat was inevitable and that the sooner it accepted terms, the better for everyone, Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent foreign policy analyst who advises the Kremlin, wrote in an op-ed in a Russian publication.

“The goal of Kyiv and the collective Brussels was to convince Trump that the belief in Ukraine’s inevitable defeat was mistaken,” Lukyanov wrote. “Ten months after the Anchorage summit, they succeeded in persuading him.”

Since Alaska, no major breakthrough has materialized in Russia’s favor, Europe so far has managed to sustain its military and economic aid to Ukraine, and Trump has become distracted by Iran.

“Diplomacy in the midst of hostilities is shaped by their outcome,” Lukyanov wrote. “If the balance of power — or the perception thereof — shifts, the understandings reached at an earlier stage lose their validity.”

Ukraine’s push to impose a “logistical lockdown” on Crimea and Kyiv’s growing capability to strike deep inside Russia seem to be part of a 40-day blitz declared by Zelensky to “influence” Moscow to end the war.

Continuing that pressure, Ukraine overnight launched dozens of drones at the Moscow region and struck Russia’s Dubna satellite communications center north of the capital. Zelensky said ​Russia uses the Dubna site for reconnaissance and coordination of its military activities in Ukraine.

Andrei Vorobyov, governor of the Moscow region, confirmed the attack had occurred but said that an “administrative building was damaged by drone debris.”

Amid chaotic scenes in Crimea, the Russia-installed authorities imposed a state of emergency in response to strikes on highways and bridges. There have also been blackouts that have prompted many summer visitors to return home.

“He’s holding his own at least,” Trump said of Zelensky last week, speaking to reporters at the White House. “A lot of people dying on both sides, but I think he’s doing pretty well. You have to say he’s courageous, he’s got great equipment, he’s got great men, he’s got fighters.”

Ukraine seems to have scaled drone production to a level that can sustain strikes on Russian cities hundreds of miles from the border, and that keeps the frontline kill zone stable. This means that ground action is drying up.

“The war has markedly changed this year,” said Ruslan Leviev, an analyst with the Conflict Intelligence Team, a group that uses open-source data to track the Russian military.

“It’s hard to say the battle initiative is on the Ukrainian side,” Leviev said, “but time is on Ukraine’s side — more problems keep arising for Russia, economically, politically, and militarily, and it’s all adding up.”

Russian budget data indicates that its military recruited 71,216 men during the first quarter of 2026, compared with 89,601 over the same period last year, according to Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the Berlin-based German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Recruitment stabilized somewhat in the second quarter, returning to around 30,000 contracts per month. But local media reports suggest the overall stream of recruits has slowed compared with previous years as the pool of men drawn by the enormous pay packages that eclipse regional Russian salaries appears to be shrinking.

Rumors have circulated that Russia may declare a fresh mobilization after key parliamentary elections in the fall — the first since the war began — but politically that move could prove extremely costly for the Kremlin. The “partial mobilization” in 2022 drove tens of thousands of men to flee Russia. After four years of war, and mounting economic strain, the mood has soured considerably.

Leviev and other analysts said that they doubt Moscow would call for full mobilization, since this would require significant financial resources to set up new formations, and train and equip them, and that such a move fundamentally wouldn’t unfreeze the line of contact. “At this pace, the war on the ground looks to us as a dead end,” Leviev said.

This poses several challenges for Russia.

Russia still holds an advantage in manpower, conventional arms, and ballistic missiles, which it continues to use against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. But Ukraine’s relentless drone campaign, especially its use of medium-range drones, has chipped away at this advantage, complicating frontline logistics and driving up the costs for Moscow of supplying the front.

Russia’s flagship air defense systems were designed for high-altitude targets like jets and ballistic missiles, not slow, low-flying drones. Interceptor missiles also cost many times more than the drones they shoot down, draining stocks at a rate Western officials have said may be unsustainable.

In his remarks Sunday, Putin commented on the deteriorating situation in Crimea and the wider fuel shortage in Russia after weeks of silence.

Addressing Ukraine’s drone campaign, Putin said that Russia needed to “significantly ramp up production of air defense systems.” He also pledged to ensure the supply of fuel to Crimea by land and sea but did not say how this would be accomplished.

Putin also asserted that Kyiv had put forward what he called “new proposals” to curtail hostilities in four regions of eastern Ukraine — Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk — and agree to mutually halt long-range strikes.

Putin, however, cast the offer as a distraction that would allow Ukraine to redeploy units from other regions to these four areas, relieving pressure along the nearly 800-mile frontline. He reiterated that Moscow aims to fight on.

“We have some certainty regarding the challenges facing Putin, but what we can expect from him in response to these challenges remains unclear,” said Vladimir Pastukhov, a Russian political scientist and honorary senior research fellow at University College London.

According to Pastukhov, Putin has several options to escalate the war, all fraught with risk. These include an attack on a NATO nation in the Baltics, the detonation of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, or a mass mobilization of Russian soldiers. Moscow could also adopt a hybrid strategy, potentially striking European military facilities supporting Ukraine.

That would effectively be a limited, undeclared war on Europe, testing Trump’s loyalty to NATO allies.

Putin could also pressure its ally Belarus to allow Russian forces to attack Ukraine from its territory, opening a new northern front.

Putin on Sunday said Russia was expecting a resumption of U.S.-led peace talks and a visit to Moscow by U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — once the “hot ​phase” of the Iran war is resolved.

Lukyanov, the analyst, said Russia believes that Trump’s position on the war in Ukraine will shift again — as it has many times. “But first,” he wrote, “the White House must be brought to the understanding that a military victory for Russia’s adversaries is impossible.”

The July Fourth fireworks show on the National Mall will start later, last longer, and have far more pyrotechnics than any held previously on Independence Day, according to officials in charge of producing the event.

Typically, the Fourth of July fireworks at the core of the nation’s capital begin a little before 9:30 p.m. and last 17 to 25 minutes. This year, the show won’t begin until after 10:30 p.m. and may not start until 11 p.m., a spokesperson for Freedom 250, the public-private partnership aligned with President Donald Trump that has taken over much of the programming for America’s semiquincentennial, said in an email.

The show is expected to last approximately 40 minutes.

No reason has been publicly provided for why the fireworks will start so late, but Trump has described the event as a “rally” and said he will begin speaking at 9 p.m. The duration of the fireworks is longer — about twice the average length — because of the administration’s goal of setting a record for the world’s largest fireworks display.

Danielle Alvarez, an adviser to Freedom 250, did not specifically address the late time but called the July 4 event a “once-in-a-generation milestone.”

“This isn’t just another Independence Day. It’s America’s 250th,” Alvarez said in a statement. “And history only comes around once.”

The late start, as well as rules prohibiting attendees from bringing coolers, lawn chairs, bags, and more than one bottle of water, drew criticism on social media and elsewhere, particularly because organizers have recommended people arrive early Saturday, when temperatures could surpass 100 degrees.

A Freedom250 spokesperson said there will be four free hydration stations on the Mall.

“We’re closely monitoring conditions and will keep adjusting as needed to make sure everyone stays safe and has a great time,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) urged anyone attending the fireworks show on the Mall to stay hydrated and be cautious.

“The thing to remember, especially with this heat, is that’s a long, long day,” Bowser said at a news conference Monday to discuss safety measures for Independence Day. “I’m expecting … that families with small children are going to decide that the children should watch on TV or watch at a neighborhood event.”

The current record for a single display is about 810,000 fireworks, launched at a New Year’s event in the Philippines in 2016, according to Guinness World Records. That display lasted a little over an hour and took place in a driving rain.

Pyrotecnico, the Pennsylvania-based company putting on this year’s show, plans to set off more than 850,000 fireworks from 10 locations including West Potomac Park, the Reflecting Pool, and barges in the Potomac River, Pyrotecnico CEO Stephen Vitale said in an interview Monday.

Vitale said he hopes the weather will cooperate and that there will be a slight breeze to clear the smoke and keep all of the fireworks visible.

A typical July Fourth fireworks show on the Mall in D.C. features about 20,000 fireworks, Vitale said. While this year’s show is about 10 times bigger than any previous show his company has produced, he hopes viewers will remember the show for more than just setting a record.

“Size always helps, but it’s about the beauty and the memories that people will have for generations,” Vitale said. “Fireworks are magical to people, and we help people walk away believing that’s the best fireworks display that they have seen or ever will see.”