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Native American History

Bison are returning to tribal lands under a conservation program launched by Deb Haaland, the first Native American Secretary of the Interior.

It’s important to remember the contributions of Native Americans, as well as their mistreatment.

Considered by many to have been the world’s greatest athlete, Jim Thorpe persevered through triumphs and tragedy.

While his brother Tecumseh was assembling the greatest Indian confederation the United States army would ever confront, the “Prophet” launched a fateful preemptive attack in Indiana Territory in 1811.

Editor’s Note: One of the most respected historians of the Civil War and Indian conflicts, Peter Cozzens has written 17 books and is now at work on the third volume of a trilogy about the Indian wars in the American West, the Old Northwest (America’s Heartland), and the Old S

In Florida during the 1830s, a young Indian warrior led a bold and bloody campaign against the government's plan to relocate his people west of the Mississippi River.

Born Billy Powel in
Americans have always envisioned a west. When they won independence from England in 1783, the west lay just beyond the Appalachian Mountains, a west celebrated in the adventures of Daniel Boone. Then, people began to thread through the Cumberland Gap to make new homes there.

AFTER CENTURIES OF CONFLICT OVER THEIR RIGHTS AND POWERS, Indian tribes now increasingly make and enforce their own laws, often answerable to no one in the United States government. Is this the rebirth of their ancient independence or a new kind of legalized segregation?

 

Elaborate earthworks engineered 2000 years ago by an impenetrably mysterious people still stand in astonishing abundance throughout the Ohio River Valley.

Robert Maslowski and I made our way carefully across the tobacco field, trying not to disturb the neat rows of freshly plowed furrows.

Starting with a single, haunting battlefield image, an amateur photo detective managed to reconstruct a forgotten photographer’s life and uncover a treasure of Indian portraits.

I had waited six months to see it. A long-time collector, I loved to roam the monthly swap meet in Long Beach, California near my home.

How Creek Indian number 1501 repaid a debt

In August 1902, a 12-year-old farm boy named Thomas Gilcrease, being one-eighth Creek Indian on his mother’s side, received a 160-acre allotment in the land of the Creek Nation, one of the Five Civilized Tribes, which occupied what yet remained of Indian Territory in America.

Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment, or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.

When the historian Richard White wrote his first scholarly article about Indian environmental history in the mid-1970s, he knew he was taking a new approach to an old field, but he did not realize just how new it was.

Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment, or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.

When the historian Richard White wrote his first scholarly article about Indian environmental history in the mid-1970s, he knew he was taking a new approach to an old field, but he did not realize just how new it was.

The hands of Pueblo potter Maria Martinez have reached back across more than seven hundred years of history to create pottery that is now proudly displayed in museums and private collections all over the world.

     

Thousands of Native American pictographs and petroglyphs are at risk from vandalism amd theft.

   

So spoke Sitting Bull, greatest of Sioux chiefs, as he bitterly watched his people bargain away their Dakota homeland

One innovation profoundly changed—and prolonged—the culture of the Plains Indians

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