Introducing "First America": How 250 Years of History Shaped Today's Political Moment

In January 2025, journalist Rebecca Nagel visited Fort Snelling in Minneapolis with historian Nick Estus, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe. They stood on ground that was once a concentration camp for over 1,600 Dakota people during the winter of 1862, part of a broader campaign of death marches, massacres, bounties on Indigenous heads, and mass executions. Today, the site is a tourist attraction where people cross-country ski. As they stood there, Estus’s phone rang. A woman named Renee Nicole Good had been shot and killed by ICE agents while trying to block them with her car. The ICE headquarters was located on the same federal land—land that became federal through a 1805 treaty with Dakota leaders. “It’s not just the same place,” Estus said. “The same thing is happening. People are being hunted in their neighborhoods.”

Nagel had set out to make a history podcast about how Native people have been erased from the American story. But the present kept intruding. She began asking a question she thinks many Americans are asking: How is this happening? The answers she kept hearing—YouTube, lonely white men, the economy—didn’t satisfy her. “The more time I spend in the past,” she says, “the more the present makes sense.”

The Declaration’s Last Complaint