“Thomas Jefferson: Indigenous American Storyteller,” in Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West: From Conquest to Conservation, edited by James P. Ronda, University of New Mexico Press, 1997, pp. 43-74.

In the following essay, Williams, a Native American scholar, explores Jefferson's ideas of Native American inferiority that contributed to the Indians' removal in the nineteenth century, but suggests that today Jefferson's writings on natural rights could be used as arguments to decolonize Native American populations living on reservations.

What's the Use?

Writing as a Native American scholar, I wish to ask in this essay what use Indian peoples of the changing, twenty-first century American West can find for Thomas Jefferson's eighteenth-century vision of America. Having previously studied Jefferson's writings on Indians,¹ I knew from the start that this would be a difficult task to carry out.

When you get right down to it, Thomas Jefferson didn't have much use for...