Indigenous journalist’s podcast explores the history America leaves out

Alexandra Martinez

Sep 17, 2026

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Indigenous writer and journalist Rebecca Nagle’s latest podcast, called “First America,” examines the history of the U.S. through the experiences of Indigenous nations—and asks what that history reveals about the country today. The project, released earlier this summer, was conceived in 2022 by Nagle and a group of Indigenous scholars who set out to tell a different version of the American story: one that places Indigenous people at the center.

In a conversation with Prism’s senior news reporter Alexandra Martinez, Nagle discussed how “First America” took shape, what she learned while reporting for it, and why she believes the history of Indigenous dispossession is essential to understanding the U.S. government and its relationship to democracy.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Alexandra Martinez: The first episode begins with Renee Nicole Good’s killing by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis. How quickly did you realize her story was connected to this much larger history of Indigenous genocide and U.S. expansion?

Rebecca Nagle: That wasn’t really part of the plan. I went to Minneapolis to interview historian Nick Estes, who is Lakota and was part of the creation of the project. We had a reporting trip planned, and one day, while we were interviewing him, we went to a historic site called Fort Snelling, which was used as a concentration camp during the 1860s by the U.S. federal government during the Dakota Wars. While we were there, Nick got a call from his wife saying that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)] had shot and killed someone.

It was a coincidence, but an eerie one because there were a lot of parallels in the history. The next day, I went back to Fort Snelling—not to visit the historic fort, but to go to a protest. ICE is headquartered on the Fort Snelling campus, which is still federal land because it was once a military reservation.

This idea of our government rounding people up, or even killing people who get in the way, is something the government has done before. One of the things I heard repeatedly in Minneapolis was that this was unprecedented; this is un-American. “How could this be happening?” when actually the same thing has happened in the same place.

This history of what our government did to Indigenous people—that we don’t know how to talk about, which a lot of Americans know little or maybe even nothing about—is foundational to us understanding why things are the way they are in the United States right now.

Martinez: Was there a particular discovery or reporting trip that changed the direction of the podcast?

Nagle: The most influential reporting trip was when we spent four days in Ohio with leaders from the Miami Tribe and the Myaamia Center.

I knew I wanted to tell the story of the early wars between their tribe and the United States, often called the Northwest Indian Wars. There was a confederacy of tribes led by the Miami that resisted U.S. encroachment.

That reporting trip was meaningful because when you talk about the history of the U.S. military, it can feel like a big abstract idea. But these are also tribal histories. It’s not just the United States that is being shaped by these things.

Martinez: What was the hardest part of reporting the story, particularly when you were moving between a recent act of violence and a much longer history of violence against Indigenous people?

Nagle: A lot of the content is really heavy. One episode is about genocide. There were many times when I felt the weight of the history, but also the weight of the present-day stakes.

A lot of people right now are asking how this could be happening in the United States. Why is authoritarianism on the rise? People often look to other countries, like Russia or Germany, for explanations.

Authoritarianism has always been part of our government. … We’ve just been very good as Americans at not seeing it.

Rebecca nagle, host of “First America” podcast

One of the big things I learned through this reporting is that authoritarianism has always been part of our government. There has always been a part of the government that operated from the top down. We’ve just been very good as Americans at not seeing it.

Martinez: What do you think most Americans misunderstand about the founding of the United States and its relationship to Indigenous people?

Nagle: The biggest misunderstanding is that the founding fathers created a democracy.

Even now, when democracy feels fragile or imperiled, we tend to say, “This is a democracy. It has been a democracy for 250 years.” Or we say that perhaps it was a flawed democracy that didn’t include everyone, but that subsequent generations expanded the vision through women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and constitutional amendments.

What I learned through this project is that when you look at colonialism and empire, democracy kind of goes out the window.

The founding fathers were building two things at once. They were building a democracy for themselves—balance of power, voting, elections, representation—and at the same time, they were consciously building an empire so the United States could expand west.

They talked about colonies. They called the Northwest Territory America’s first colony. They called it an “empire of liberty.”

When you look at how that empire governed, it was often top-down and frequently operated through presidential power. That history matters when we think about questions of presidential overreach or declining democratic accountability today.

Martinez: The fact that the U.S. was built through the dispossession and attempted destruction of Indigenous nations can be difficult to confront. What do you hope listeners do with that discomfort?

Nagle: I actually think people are further along than we give them credit for. Most people know that what our government did to Native people was wrong.

Where I think the gap is, is that people dramatically underestimate the extent and level of the violence. But I think the biggest disconnect is that people see it as something that happened in isolation, a terrible thing that happened a long time ago that doesn’t affect them.

But the government that rounded up Native families and put them in concentration camps, organized death marches, and carried out campaigns of state-sanctioned slaughter—that’s the United States government. That’s our government.

One of the legal scholars we worked with, Maggie Blackhawk, said something that really struck me: There isn’t anything specific about Native people that made us more susceptible to violence. The same mechanisms can be used against anybody, and they already have been throughout U.S. history.

So the goal isn’t simply historical guilt. It’s recognizing that a democratic government shouldn’t be capable of these things. And because our government committed these atrocities and we never fundamentally changed the structures that allowed them to happen, those structures still matter.

Martinez: Who benefits from the way American history is traditionally told?

Nagle: As a Native person, what’s difficult is that both sides leave us out.

We’re in a culture war over how history should be taught, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Revisionist history is often part of authoritarian politics. These movements tend to construct a story about a past moment when society was supposedly great, and then use that story to shape the present.

The fight over history is so bitter because a lot of power flows from the dominant narrative. It shapes public policy and how people understand their country.

What’s particularly difficult is that even the more progressive version of American history can leave Native people out. In that version, the founding fathers may have been deeply flawed, but subsequent generations fought for freedom and liberty and gradually created a more perfect democracy.

But you can only tell that story of American progress if you erase Native people.

There were Indigenous nations living sovereign lives in what is now the United States well into the 1800s. Their lives were not dictated by the U.S. government until later, and when that changed, it often happened through extreme violence.

When you bring American colonialism and empire into the story, that straightforward narrative of progress becomes much harder to sustain.

Martinez: How would you like to see this history taught more truthfully? Should textbooks be rewritten?

Nagle: It has to happen everywhere.

One example we talk about in the podcast is the Declaration of Independence. One of the major grievances against King George III concerned Indigenous affairs. Colonists were angry that the British government was limiting their ability to expand westward and take Native land.

We tend to tell the story of the American Revolution through the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre, and the “shot heard ’round the world.” But years before those events, backcountry militias in Pennsylvania were attacking British troops because those troops were trading with Native tribes. The name of the backcountry militia is called the Black Boys. That story is not told in history textbooks. It’s not told in museums. It’s not taught as an important event leading up to the American Revolution.

[Change has to happen] from regular textbooks to museums, but even in how these things are talked about in academia, how they’re talked about in the media. The erasure is actually very pervasive.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor