The Indigenous Peoples of these lands know that American democracy was born carrying a deep contradiction. The United States proclaimed that all people were created equal while Indigenous Nations were being dispossessed, African people were held in slavery, women were denied political standing, and millions of human beings were excluded from the circle of rights.
The democratic vision was real and powerful, but its application was profoundly incomplete. That original contradiction has never been fully healed. It continues to express itself in economic inequality, racial injustice, broken treaties, political exclusion, concentrated wealth, environmental destruction, and the growing distance between governing institutions and the people they are meant to serve.