Ken Burns

Every school kid knows that when the 60 or 70 people, all white males, both rich and poor in Boston, dumped 40 tons of tea, 40 tons of tea in the harbor, they were dressed crudely as Native Americans.

And if you ask a kid, why were they dressed that way?

Well, you know, just to disguise, to put the blame on somebody else.

It was to say, we're not part of the mother country anymore.

We're here.

We're aboriginal.

We are Americans.

We are distinct.

We've been having complaints about British citizenship.

We're arguing British law.

But all of a sudden, those laws have been broken out into natural laws.

And we're telling you that we're not trying to blame it on anyone else.

Nobody would for a second have thought that the Native Americans would have dumped the tea.

They weren't burdened by the tea tax.

What they were doing was saying we are – and it's so ironic given the history of our relationship to the dispossession of native lands.

They are saying we are aboriginal.

This is what the scholar Phil Deloria says.

So yeah, wow.

Right.

We're saying we're not of the mother country.