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A photograph of John G. Neihardt raising his fists to box.

A Tale of Two Visionaries

What roiled the mind of Nebraska poet John Neihardt with whom Black Elk, the iconic Lakota holy man, shared his story?
Collage of a contemporary man encircled by layers of an old map, looking at 19th-century men walking past him.

Those Who Know

On Raoul Peck's "Exterminate all the Brutes" and the limits of rewriting the narrative.

How Aztecs Told History

For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices.
Nicholas Black Elk

Wounded Knee and the Myth of the Vanished Indian

The story of the 1890 massacre was often about the end of Native American resistance to US expansion. But that’s not how everyone told it.
Phil Little Thunder, a great-great-grandchild of the Lakota chief whose village was attacked in 1855.

How Recovering the History of a Little-Known Lakota Massacre Could Heal Generational Pain

The unraveling of this long-buried atrocity is forging a path toward reconciliation.
Cover of Ned Blackhawk's book; a pole with feathers attached is next to the title, "The Rediscovery of America"

The Promise and Perils of Synthetic Native History

Over the past year, two prominent historians have invited readers to rethink the master narrative of US history.
A faux Brazilian village constructed for Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici on the banks of the Seine in Rouen, France, and inhabited by fifty Tupinambá people who were forcibly brought there from Brazil, 1550.

The Discovery of Europe

A new book investigates the indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the 1500s—a story central to the beginning of globalization.
Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese on the set of "Killers of the Flower Moon."

How Publicity of Killers of the Flower Moon Recalls Rosebud Yellow Robe’s 1950 Hollywood Tour

On the performance of authenticity and the native stories left to tell.
A scene from the “Lost Colony,” an outdoor historical drama in Manteo, N.C., in 2017.

A North Carolina Town’s Historic Play Ends Redface and Hires Native Actors

“The Lost Colony” had dramatized American mythology in the Outer Banks since 1937 with White actors as Indians. Now, Native performers are rewriting the story.
Southwestern Indian drawing of people at work.

Saline Survivance: The Life of Salt and the Limits of Colonization in the Southwest

Once highly valuable, salt affords a new look at life, environment, and sovereignty in the southwest borderlands.
Artwork of Sacagawea, surrounded by yellow flowers.

Getting Sacagawea Right

New evidence suggests that Sacagawea had a longer life than most historians have believed — fifty-seven years longer.
Two Pueblo people hold an American flag at the Ceremonial Cave of the Frijoles Canyon in New Mexico.

Without Indigenous History, There Is No U.S. History

It is impossible to understand the U.S. without understanding its Indigenous history, writes Ned Blackhawk.
A window through which an otherwise black and white leaf can be seen with a rainbow.

Native American Histories Show Rebuilding is Possible — and Necessary — After Catastrophe

What the Medicine Wheel, an indigenous American model of time, shows about apocalypse.
Venable Mound, Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, built ca. 700–1200 CE.

Monuments Upon the Tumultuous Earth

For thousands of years, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids along the Mississippi River.
Sketches of animal bones superimposed on a map of rivers in the midwest.

The First Fossil Finders in North America Were Enslaved and Indigenous People

Decades before paleontology’s formal establishment, Black and Native Americans discovered—and correctly identified—millennia-old fossils.
Alien Invasion, 1492, by Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, depicting animals with harsh lines and the word "un-erasing."

How Wikipedia Distorts Indigenous History

Native editors are fighting back.
Yellow book cover reading "The Dawn of Everything" in red text.

As Deep as it is Vast: An Introduction to "The Dawn of Everything" in Early America

A new book provides a framework that engages with “big history” or “deep history” while avoiding explanations that flirt with forms of determinism.
Painting of Yosemite Valley

How Place Names Impact The Way We See Landscape

Western landscapes and their names are stratified with personal memories, ancestral teachings, mythic events and colonial disturbances.
Franz Boas adopts the pose of a wild Hamat̓sa, crouching with outstretched arms and mouth open.

On the Influence of Indigenous Knowledge on Modern Thought

We often associate dance with art and performance, but it is also a way that humans document, interpret, and create history.
Cherokee leader and Louisiana governor shaking hands

The Cherokee-American War from the Cherokee Perspective

Conflict between American settlers/revolutionaries and the Cherokee nation erupted in the early years of the Revolution.
Iroquois Leaders

One of the Most Important American Documents You’ve Never Heard Of

Colonial lessons in civility from the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee.
Abstract design in which adults and children are isolated from each other using computers and tablets, floating near a raised Black fist, a mask, and a TV camera.

Apocalypse Then and Now

A dispatch from Wounded Knee that layers the realities of poverty, climate change, and resilience on the history of colonization, settlement, and genocide.
Pictures of people in collage form.

The Center Does Not Hold

Jill Lepore’s awkward embrace of the nation.
American Indian woman and children.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

“Our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. Our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”

The Vanishing Indians of “These Truths”

Jill Lepore's widely-praised history of the U.S. relies on the eventual exit of indigenous actors to make way for other dramas.

Forgiving the Unforgivable: Geronimo’s Descendants Seek to Salve Generational Trauma

Traveling to the heart of Mexico for a Ceremonia del Perdón.

History of Survivance: Upper Midwest 19th-Century Native American Narratives

A series of objects of both Native and non-Native origin that tell a story of extraordinary culture disruption.
“The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,” an 1885 parody of an 1850 painting by Charles Lucy.

Thankstaking

Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?
A river surrounded by trees and mountains

From the Reservation to the River: On the Complexities of Writing About a Native Childhood

Remembering the river helps me forget, at least for a moment, the challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy I experienced in my childhood.
LaNada Means War Jack with raised fist at Indian Land sign on Alcatraz.
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The 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz Was a Catalyst for Indigenous Activism

American Indian tribes have long used activism in their struggle for justice and the preservation of their lands and culture.

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