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# The British Museum Opens a Most Interesting Exhibition on the USA
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-britanskom-muzee-otkryli-ochen-interesnuiu-vystavku-o-ssha/
- Published: 2026-07-04T19:37:01.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:42.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Coming Up, London, Museums, Society, Ethnography

The British Museum has opened a most interesting exhibition on the USA. It is not, however, a parade of panegyrics for the 250th anniversary of the United States, but a reminder that many indigenous peoples were not at all delighted by American independence.

Although the exhibition, Declaring Independence: USA 250, is rather small, its thesis is exceedingly curious. The point is not merely that the indigenous peoples, usually struck from the history of independence, are given a voice, or rather a place in the museum display case. It is that the curators draw attention, for instance, to the war that was fought on Indian land.

And indeed, for the indigenous peoples the signing of the Declaration on 2 August 1776 was by no means a liberation. True, some of America's native inhabitants did side with the revolutionaries, but the majority nevertheless took Britain's part. The chief reason was the dispute over Indian land. In 1763 the Crown, in debt after the Seven Years' War, forbade the colonists to settle west of the Appalachians, and it was precisely this prohibition that the colonists, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin among them, so sharply resented. In other words, one of the motive forces behind the revolution was the desire to seize Indian lands.

Among the exhibits are three diplomatic gifts. The first is the silver "Washington Peace Medal", engraved in 1777 by Paul Revere and presented to the Wabanaki Confederacy as a token of alliance against the British. One side shows the young Washington, then commander of the Continental Army; the other, a column, 13 hands for the number of the colonies, and the figure of an Indian at its base. The medal was later confiscated by British troops and handed to George III. It turns out that the object passed through the hands of all three sides of the conflict.

The second exhibit is a pipe-tomahawk, given to the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant by the Duke of Northumberland. The Mohawks, led by Joseph Brant, fought for Britain. Under the Treaty of Paris of 1783 Britain ceded to the USA all the land south of the Great Lakes, and the Mohawk homeland in the Mohawk River valley, in what is now New York State, found itself within the new American borders. The Mohawks themselves, meanwhile, had been neither defeated nor made party to the treaty. In exchange for the lost homeland the Crown granted them lands in Canada, along the Grand River in Ontario, where to this day stands the largest Iroquois reserve, Six Nations of the Grand River.

The third exhibit is a Lenape wampum belt, one of those used to record treaties. This belt marks the Lenape's peace agreement of 1712 with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. In 1778 the Lenape were the first of the indigenous nations to conclude a formal treaty with the revolutionaries.

During the exhibition the three objects will be joined by the Sussex Declaration, the only handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence besides the original, found ten years ago in the West Sussex archive.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20912@04-07-2026_22-37-01.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20913@04-07-2026_22-37-01.jpg)

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