Native Americans

The slaughter of some 300 Lakota men, women and children by U.S. Army troops in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre marked a tragic coda to decades of violent confrontations between the United States and Plains Indians. In the years leading up to the massacre, the Indigenous Lakota ...read more

As America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln left a towering legacy. His deep belief in the founding principles of American democracy—that every human deserved liberty and the opportunity for self-determination—compelled him to free enslaved African Americans. But when it came to ...read more

In the summer of 1561, Spanish explorers abducted a Powhatan Indian youth from the Chesapeake Bay tidewater region and brought him to the royal court of Spain. The kidnapping set off a chain of events that would alter the course of American colonial history. The abduction itself ...read more

In March 1621, representatives of the Wampanoag Confederacy—the Indigenous people of the region that is now southeastern Massachusetts—negotiated a treaty with a group of English settlers who had arrived on the Mayflower several months earlier and were struggling to build a life ...read more

Lacrosse, America's oldest team sport, dates to 1100 A.D., when it was played by the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois people, in what now is New York and areas in Canada bordering the state. The early versions of lacrosse matches played by Native American nations included 100 to 1,000 ...read more

Decades before Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders starred in baseball and football, Jim Thorpe was America’s original multi-sport athlete. A two-time college football All-American and charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Thorpe played six seasons of Major League Baseball ...read more

Wrangel Island sits north of the Siberian coast in the harsh Arctic waters of the East Siberian and Chukchi Seas. Surrounded by ice for much of the year and buffeted by fierce cyclonic winds throughout it, it is the last known redoubt of the woolly mammoth and is the site of the ...read more

Centuries before the creation of the United States and its Constitution, democracy had already taken root in North America—among a handful of Indigenous nations. Known as the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, this league of nations emerged among five northeast woodlands ...read more

Nearly 100 years before the American Revolution, another war of independence took place on American soil—against Spanish colonizers. Coordinated by Tewa leader Po'Pay, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 saved Indigenous cultures from destruction under a feudal system that enslaved ...read more

In early 2021, Deb Haaland was sworn in as the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, making her the first Native American cabinet secretary in the history of the United States. A tribal member of the Laguna Pueblo, she was raised in New Mexico, a state that has been ...read more

When Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, he hoped the land would be rich with gold, silver and precious spices, but perhaps the New World’s greatest treasure was its bounty of native food crops cultivated for millennia by Indigenous Americans. As much as three-fifths of ...read more

Native American warriors like Sitting Bull (Lakota), Tecumseh (Shawnee) and Geronimo (Apache) have long been celebrated as defenders of Indigenous territories. Their courageous resistance to foreign invaders helped to ensure cultural survival. One lesser-known warrior was ...read more

For more than 250 years, as Europeans sought to control newly settled American land, wars raged between Native Americans and the frontiersmen who encroached on their territory, resources and trade. Known as the American Indian Wars, the conflicts involved Indigenous people, the ...read more

Native Americans aren’t often associated with New York City and its dense, vertical landscape. With so many Indian nations pushed to America’s frontier in the 19th century, they usually appear in popular culture as denizens of the rural West, occupying wide open spaces replete ...read more

How did a high-standing Indian who signed away his ancestral lands in the Deep South become a general for the Confederacy during the Civil War? And why did he fight so fiercely against other Native people during the conflict? Stand Watie lived during a convulsive time for his ...read more

Native people pass down information—including food traditions—from one generation to the next through stories, histories, legends and myths. Native elders teach younger generations how to prepare wild game and fish, how to find wild plants, which plants are edible, their names, ...read more

The faces of four U.S. presidents gaze from a granite face mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota. To some, Mount Rushmore is hailed as the “Shrine of Democracy.” To American Indians, the monument is typically considered a shrine of illegal occupation. So while Mount ...read more