Who is included in "We the People"?
Our thanks to historian Jill Lepore, and announcing our November Book Club pick, Julian Brave NoiseCat's "We Survived the Night"
In closing out our discussion of the U.S. Constitution with historian Jill Lepore, she told us that the phrase “we the people” is “the most richly amended phrase” in our founding document. Why? As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in his remarks on the occasion of the Constitution’s 200th birthday in 1987, when the framers used this phrase in 1787, “they did not have in mind the majority of America’s citizens.”
Part of that majority were the original inhabitants of the land claimed by the United States as its own. Lepore writes in We the People about how Native scholars like Vine Deloria Jr. have argued that it’s not just the fact that the founders left out Native people that’s a problem, but that the Constitution — written to protect property and only later extended to protect rights — rested on a conception of belonging too individualist to encompass a truly multicultural nation. New narratives are necessary.
“We have never had a ‘peoplehood’ in this country because we have always been tied to a barren conception of man,” he wrote. He didn’t think a new Constitution was necessary, but he did think that “We the People” ought to be reread to mean “We the Peoples.”
This Native American Heritage Month, we celebrate an extraordinary new voice in literature. Our new Ink Book Club selection is We Survived the Night, the first book by the writer, environmental activist, political strategist, and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat, whose 2024 documentary, Sugarcane, won the Directing Award in U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. Starting from an investigation into abuse and death at an Indian residential school, it’s a work that fuses history, myth, memoir, and oral history with the tale of a son wrestling with a heritage of loss. NoiseCat explores the persistence and legacy, in the face of attempted erasure, of the continent’s First Peoples.
We will host two Substack Live conversations with this powerful new writer. Join us on Wednesday, November 19, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, and then again on Wednesday, December 3, also at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, as we discuss We Survived the Night.
Before we meet up with Julian Brave NoiseCat, we’ve put together some questions below for our Book Club members to think about.
The Ink Book Club is open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.