First off, Rebecca, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself? Tell me who you are and what you do.

Yeah, Oseo, gohin, daodon, to like a yetli, Gaila. Hi, my name is Rebecca Nagel. I'm a citizen of Cherokee Nation,

and I am a writer and a journalist and the host of the podcast, First America.

First America is not just an inversion of the Trumpy phrase America first, though it is that. It's Rebecca's attempt to understand why Native people have been written out of American history.

In this moment when we're about to celebrate a big 250th birthday, be inundated by stars and stripes and eagles and fireworks,

Rebecca starts with a different symbol, the visual shorthand used by the founders as they tried to break away from England.

For the founding generation, that symbol was native people.

The figure of a native person appeared in political cartoons.

The founding generation put native people on guns, on pamphlets, on ships.

One of the, like, biggest examples is when they actually stormed ships in the Boston Harbor to throw tea overboard.

They put on a costume and they dressed up like Native Americans.

They dressed up like they called themselves

Mohawks. Early Americans were working out, what does it mean to be American? What is our

national identity? And they were in a tricky place, right? Because they're not English anymore.

They're actually literally fighting a war to no longer be English.

But they're not yet something else, right?

They're sort of in this in-between place.

And plain Indian is kind of the bridge that gets them to this new American identity.

An identity that we as a country are wrestling with now.

This summer, we will tell ourselves a lot of stories about what it means to be an American.

And I think the big argument of First America is that without us,

actually, the story is wrong. It's just straight up not what happened. And so you, to get to the

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