The participants in the Boston Tea Party tax protest and their revolutionary associates were enthusiastic supporters of immigration. Although some of them dressed as Mohawk warriors during the 1773 protest at Boston Harbor, they did not espouse nativism as many in today’s Tea Party do.
In 1773 the Tea Party protestors hid behind the face paint to protest taxes without getting arrested afterwards, and possibly to symbolize their ties to the land. Though Indian land rights were often denied, colonists recognized the wealth of Native farms, fisheries, tools and trade, and admired their forms of government. It is conceivable that the 1773 protestors identified with the Mohawks in some sense.
Today the Tea Party protestors have hidden the paint. They want no association with Indian tribes in their quest to maintain "native" status and the "original" American way of life.
There is some diversity within the 21st century Tea Party. For example, deficit hawks and tax protestors have somehow come together. These folks may actually have something in common with the protestors of 1773, and the participants in the colonial Boston Tea Party. But the anti-immigration movement within the Tea Party is another story. This faction has nothing at all to do with the colonial Tea Party. They are essentially nativists who prioritize birth rights over achievement. Their growing presence in the Tea Party is a major reason why you won’t see many Tea Party protestors wearing the buckskin leggings and red and black face paint of a Mohawk warrior.
The colonial Tea Party protestors were all about immigration. In the 1770s there were most likely more Native people in North America than there were colonists. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and several other revolutionaries were proponents of continued colonial expansion and population increase. Burgeoning immigration was a key component of early U.S. expansion, but checks were in place to keep rule internal, and largely in the hands of male landowners. As the canal system opened up new regions to intensive agriculture and industry, immigrants were needed to buttress the new economy. It wasn’t until waves of immigration in the 19th century, after the nascent decades of the democracy, that nativism arose in political philosophy. Think of Daniel Day Lewis’s character in the film Gangs of New York.
Tea Party protestors wore the garb of the Indians, and in particular they borrowed the face paint that symbolized warfare. But their true goal was to own the land and its bounty without sharing its bounty with the King of England and the East Indian Company. Colonists were all too ready to acknowledge the vast resources of the land they and their grandparents had usurped. They had taken it from the Indian tribes who had cultivated and fertilized the vast fields of corn and other crops, tended the nut trees and managed the forests for game with controlled burning, and sustained the fish in the rivers through the judicious use of weirs. The colonists even borrowed from the Mohawk and other Iroquois in forming a system of government.
The Mohawk warrior image is a powerful one, but it is not widely adopted by today’s Tea Party. The reason for this has a lot to do with the concept of native identity. On the one hand we might appreciate that this is a rare instance where a Native American image is removed as a symbol and not perpetuated as with mascots, for example. But the nativism behind this omission is insidious enough.
The colonial Tea Party was made up of immigrants who had overtaken the vast farms, forests and fisheries of Native tribes. Today’s Tea Party nativists have a different sense of entitlement. They believe in the priority of birth rights over achievement, and they see continued immigration as usurpation of their birth right. This seems to be a good time to reflect on the origin of the movement.