Bloomingdale author George Bryjak explores the connection between the people here before the Europeans and the America signed into being in 1776 Philadelphia.

Consider the book’s epigraph from historian Jill Lepore: “The Revolution in America … began not with the English colonists but with the people over whom they ruled. Long before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord…a revolutionary tradition was forged, not by the English in America, but by Indians, and slaves waging rebellions.”

Bryjak begins his analysis of that relationship between Indian rebellions and the American Revolution with a 1493 proclamation from Pope Alexander VI. This document declared Spain had authority over the people and the land it was exploring. If the Indigenous people did not accept Spanish rule, they were warned, “We will take you and your wives and children and make them slaves, and as such we will sell them, and will dispose of you and them as Their Highnesses order.”

There’s more, all of it laying a legal/philosophical foundation for Europeans — including French, Dutch and English — to conquer the native population and take whatever they wanted.

In addition to being a historian, Bryjak is a sociologist, and that perspective is obvious in his treatment of the native groups. He writes of the lodging, beliefs, child rearing, and commercial trade of the six Iroquois nations. And he describes the lifestyle of the more western Lenape, Shawnee and Cherokee. His treatment is not shallow or idealized – he writes of the cruelty, the torture of enemies sometimes present in Indian culture.

For these Indians, Bryjak writes, “land was a gift from the Creator to be held in community for everyone.” The incursion of Europeans who wanted all of the land for themselves, who bought and sold land, who could conceive of private property — conflict was inevitable.

In support of the concept that Indian conflicts impacted the American Revolution (1775), Bryjak reviews that war, the French and Indian War (1756-63), and Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763). This is a complicated section of the book, with commercial, political, racist threads present. Whether it demonstrates the “Revolutionary tradition” historian Lepore wrote of is not clear to this reader. What is clear is what historian Robert G. Parkinson wrote and Bryjak quotes: “We have underestimated how much African Americans and Indians were on the minds of patriot political leaders… at the moment of Independence.”

In addition, the author profiles 18 Native Americans, providing short biographies of these significant figures. Some are vaguely familiar — Joseph Brant, Tecumseh, but all deserve attention that has been wanting.

This is a wonderful, complex book. George Bryjak writes well, as was already evident in his “Voices From the Civil War: North and South, Men and Women, Black and White,” which was reviewed in this newspaper. “A Nation Born” has excellent maps and a helpful bibliography. And he wisely cites the source (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) for his interchangeable use of Native American, Indian, and Indigenous People.