Last December, as the Russian military prepared to invade Ukraine, Vladimir Putin hosted a press conference. A British reporter asked if he could guarantee, unconditionally, that he would not invade Ukraine “or any other sovereign country.” Putin instead responded with his own questions: “Did Mexico and the US never have any territorial disputes? What about California? What about Texas? Did you forget about that? But everything seems to have calmed down. Nobody remembers those things just like the way they remember about Crimea.”
Putin argued that Russia annexing territories from Ukraine was no less objectionable than the United States seizing lands from Mexico in the 1840s. The US-Mexican War resulted in the loss of over half of Mexico’s territory, signaled the triumph of a “white man’s republic” over a relatively tolerant multiracial democracy, and unleashed a new and devastating chapter of consistently genocidal white settlement. And here was a world leader not criticizing this history but relishing it as precedent. Putin would not be coy about reviving an older style of imperialism at the expense of liberalism. I thought about what my role was as a Native Americanist—was this connected to what I study? As Putin picked at unhealed wounds, I thought about how the victims he invokes actually played a role in the rise of liberal democracy.
Many tribes developed their own constitutional democracies over the course of the 19th century: the Cherokee in 1827, the Choctaw in 1834, the Seneca in 1848, the Chickasaw in 1856, and many others. Their leaders insisted on calling what they had “republics,” for they too were part of a growing global community of modern nations. They acted like republics, conducting local and national elections, building legislative assemblies, celebrating a free press, debating policy in multiple languages, and insisting that under their system “the humblest child can become the chief.” These Indian nationalists applauded the emergence of distant democracies in Europe and Latin America and corresponded with North American tribes hoping to replicate the Indigenous republican model. Indian nationalists pledged their support to these “sister nations” in the form of diplomatic assistance, and they condemned European and American acts of imperialism both before and after the US took away their right to self-government at the close of the century. Like Ukraine, they did this all while simultaneously lobbying and organizing against a powerful eastern neighbor with a never-ending hunger for land and power.