Why would a population that was more than half African born describe itself as native? Perry takes the puzzle seriously and answers it politically. Reading the 1804 declaration of independence, the early republic's statute book, Jean Price-Mars and the magazine La Revue Indigène of 1927, she shows that indigenous language in Haiti works as a claim on territory and sovereignty rather than as a description of ancestry. Calling citizens indigènes let Dessalines weld a fractured body politic together while defining the French as intruders to be expelled, and it let the writers of the occupation years assert a right to self-rule that no American argument about good government could touch. Perry counts the costs as well. The rhetoric wrote the Middle Passage out of the national story, and it secured no personal liberty: one Dessalinian law ordered the public execution of any indigène found aboard a foreign ship.