Shays's Rebellion and Indigenous Revolt

In 1773, colonists in Boston Harbor pulled off one of the most infamous protests in U.S. history. They were not happy about British-imposed taxes on the colonies, so they dumped 92,000 pounds of tea into the harbor.

Of course, it wasn't just about tea. It was about who gets to make the rules. Samuel Adams insisted that the Boston Tea Party was a protest of colonists asserting the idea: "No taxation without representation."

Then came something I had never learned about.

Thirteen years after the Boston Tea Party, veterans who had not been paid for their military service and farmers who had been driven into debt — common people — shut down courts and attempted to seize a federal armory in protest of state tax policies and foreclosures in Massachusetts. This rebellion — Shays's Rebellion (1786) — helped spur the creation of the U.S. Constitution.

Imagine that: a rebellion about economic injustice lit a fire under the framers’ butts. We now know that they could have written protections into law that prevented future circumstances like the ones that led to Shays’s Rebellion, but that’s not what happened.

I often wonder what would happen if we were still organizing like the people of Shays's Rebellion did back then. Regardless, I’m so inspired by the resilience of common people as we continue to demand something better.

Shays's Rebellion was the first large-scale uprising of U.S. citizens against domestic economic policies, but it wasn’t the first fight for survival on this land. Indigenous nations had long resisted the economic systems that displaced them. Enslaved people resisted the systems that exploited them.

Long before Shays’s Rebellion, Indigenous resistance was already world-altering. In 1680, a Tewa religious leader named Popé coordinated what we now call the Pueblo Revolt — a rare moment when multiple Pueblo communities united to drive Spanish colonizers out of Santa Fe and reclaim their homelands, even if only temporarily. Accounts describe messengers carrying knotted cords from village to village—an embodied countdown to uprising.

Popé was building power, and he was not an outlier. A century later, an Odawa leader named Pontiac led another Indigenous uprising — this time against the British Empire itself. In 1763, Native nations across the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley rose up together, capturing forts, cutting supply lines, and forcing the most powerful empire on Earth to confront Indigenous sovereignty.

Like Popé, Pontiac was asserting self-determination. We can’t let these rebellions disappear. They taught the next generation how to organize. They proved that empire could be challenged — and sometimes forced to retreat.

That lineage didn’t end in the 1700s.

In 2016, at Standing Rock, Indigenous people once again put their bodies on the line to defend land, water, and sovereignty — this time against a billion-dollar oil pipeline. Like Popé and Pontiac, they organized across tribes, built community, and refused to surrender what was sacred. What looked to the outside world like a protest was, to those inside it, something much older: a people asserting their right to exist. 

There’s a peculiar juxtaposition that exemplifies what many today refer to as “the system.” The Boston Tea Party helped inspire revolution, but Shays's Rebellion inspired something else.

Both the Boston Tea Party and Shays's Rebellion were protests. They physically disrupted the systems that maintained inequality. British elites saw the Boston Tea Party as a dangerous reaction to their rule, but in the U.S. it became a celebrated origin story — one of the great patriotic myths retold in classrooms and textbooks.

You’d think that’s how the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have seen Shays’s Rebellion, too. But acts of resistance by enslaved people, Indigenous nations, and poor farmers were feared, punished, or erased from the narrative entirely.

Resistance is heroic as long as it comes from the “right” people. Gabriel must have seen this when he organized the rebellion of 1800. William Jennings Bryan must have seen this when he stood up for the common people in the late 1800s. Rebellion is sanitized when it serves the powerful and vilified when it serves the rest of us.

That is why the movements against domestic economic oppression, including Shays's Rebellion, never earn the same reverence as the Boston Tea Party of 1773. U.S. elites have usually viewed them the same way their British counterparts viewed the Boston Tea Party: as a dangerous threat to their order.

George Washington said, “There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to.” His fear of rebellion was widely shared among his contemporaries. Thomas Jefferson was an outlier — at least on paper — when he wrote, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing… It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” But Jefferson’s “medicine” wasn’t meant for everyone. He owned hundreds of enslaved people and fought to expand land seized from Indigenous nations. Even his call for rebellion was rooted in a vision of democracy that only served men like him.

Most of the founders saw Shays's Rebellion not as economic desperation, but as a threat to the new Republic. While the Boston Tea Party became patriotic folklore, Shays's Rebellion was nearly erased. That smells like a double standard to me.

It makes me wonder which stories are still buried under elitist control that’s been baked into U.S. history. Did we bury the stories of families quietly losing everything to illness, the stories of soaring profits for corporations and crippling debt for the workers that support them — stories of real people just like you and me.