Treaty negotiations granted Native nations protected sovereignty while stripping Black people of personhood

Evidence

The American insistence on crafting treaties at the national level recognized Native political and territorial sovereignty, but the terms of the treaties subordinated Native nations to the American nation. … They also underscored a meaningful difference between Native and Black people. Just as the colonies had formerly been under the “protection” of the British, Native nations would now be under the “protection” of the Americans. And while that protected status was arguably a less independent one than had previously existed, it was nevertheless a privileged one in relation to African Americans. Whereas members of the Native nations were citizens of their own countries, deserving, at least on paper, human and political rights, African Americans were citizens of nowhere and undeserving even of the rights of personhood. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 458

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading project’s central ‘origin stories as infrastructure’ framing: the federal treaty system formally encoded a racial hierarchy between Native and Black people at the founding moment.