With the consolidation of the new state, the United States of America, by 1790, the opportunity for Indigenous nations to negotiate alliances with competing European empires against the despised settlers who intended to destroy them was greatly narrowed. Nevertheless, Indigenous nations had defied the founding of the independent United States in a manner that allowed for their survival and created a legacy—a culture of resistance—that has persisted. By the time of the birth of the US republic, Indigenous peoples in what is now the continental United States had been resisting European colonization for two centuries. They had no choice given the aspirations of the colonizers: total elimination of Native nations or survival. Precolonial Indigenous societies were dynamic social systems with adaptation built into them. Fighting for survival did not require cultural abandonment. On the contrary, the cultures used already existing strengths, such as diplomacy and mobility, to develop new mechanisms required to live in nearly constant crisis. There is always a hard core of resistance in that process, but the culture of resistance also includes accommodations to the colonizing social order, including absorbing Christianity into already existing religious practices, using the colonizer’s language, and intermarrying with settlers and, more importantly, with other oppressed groups, such as escaped African slaves. Without the culture of resistance, surviving Indigenous peoples under US colonization would have been eliminated through individual assimilation.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' Hist…, loc. 181458