Historian Answers Native American Questions

I'm Ned Blackhawk, professor of history.

I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Native American Support.

A Reddit user asks,

As a non-Native American, I don't really understand

what a Native American reservation is.

The term reservation comes from the lands

that were reserved for Indians by the British government

before the American Revolution and afterwards.

The reservation system originated in the 19th century

when the United States expanded dramatically

from its former territorial boundaries

across much of western North America.

In the process, the US government entered into treaties

with native nations,

and in those treaties recognized many of their homelands

and agreed to restrict white settlement

or movement into them.

Generally speaking, reservations are governed

by tribal community members.

They have constitutions, school and hospital,

and social welfare systems,

police and national resource management.

Tribal nations are self-governing upon their territories

or upon their reservations where they have jurisdiction.

So as a non-native person,

you cannot simply move into these domains

unless you were perhaps related to

or perhaps even married to a tribal member.

Then together you could live within these communities.

The_Real_JT asks,

Why are Native American casinos a thing?

The short answer is, American Indian casinos

have been established by congressional law.

The long answer is, Native American casinos have evolved

out of the sovereign authority

that tribal communities have over their lands

and the limited jurisdiction that municipal

and state governments have upon them.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s,

as tribal communities were regaining the authority

to develop new economies, expand their governments,

fund various programs across their communities,

they increasingly sought access to federal funding.

Into the 1980s, however,

limited federal funds began eroding those years of growth,

and many tribal nations started looking at

other economic opportunities

to help build and expand their economies.

They started using their tax exempt jurisdictional status

to sell cigarettes or tobacco to offer bingo

and related gaming facilities.

Over time, that jurisdictional authority

required Congress to intervene and establish state

and tribal compacts so that casinos could be regulated,

and that is what

the Indian Gaming and Regulatory Act of 1988 did.

There is some contention about the presence of casinos

within Native American communities.

But generally speaking,

tribal communities have appreciated

the economic opportunities

that gaming facilities have provided

and have been trying to use the resources gained by gaming

to build and expand other parts of their governments.

A Quora user asks, Is there a correct map

of the original boundaries of the United States

and its tribal nations?

It is often hard to find a single image

of the contemporary Native nations of the United States,

in part because very few of them

have actually been rendered.

I've tried in my recent work to show,

not just the federally-recognized,

but the state-recognized tribes

that exist in the contiguous United States,

and that map is found on the end pages of my recent book.

This map shows the over 100

federally-recognized tribes in California,

the 38 in the state of Oklahoma,

and also the oldest continuously inhabited,

not only tribal, but human societies in North America,

the Pueblo Indians' nations of New Mexico.

These are the oldest continuously inhabited spots

upon the American landscape.

And when one sees these tribal communities

or encounters them, one comes to gauge the depth

and the complexity of Native American history.

We cannot tell the history of the United States

without these communities within them,

and we must try as best as we can to incorporate

our visions of America to locate them alongside it.

@Art101Comm asks,

How did the Navajo Code Talkers contribute to the war?

Navajo Code Talkers contributed to the successful completion

of the Second World War in the Pacific Theater

by helping to communicate military communications

in their original languages,

or in their Navajo or Dine language.

They became deployed and organized

largely in the Pacific Theater

and served valiantly in the defense of their country

and tribal nations.

The Navajo language, known as Dine Bizaad,

is one of the most difficult languages

to understand from the outside.

And so there is no way Japanese intelligence officers

could potentially crack the Navajo code.

One Reddit user asks,

Could someone help me understand the Trail of Tears?

The Trail of Tears refers to a period

of Native American history when tribal nations

across the American South were forcibly removed

from their homelands by federal and local officials.

Many fought to remain in their homelands,

but were unsuccessful in doing so.

So the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Muskogee Creek,

the Seminole Nation, and the Chickasaw

were marched to centers where they awaited deportation,

often by riverboat across the Mississippi

to what was then known as the Indian Territory.

This process led to the destruction of thousands of lives

and hundreds of communities,

and is often generally referred to as the Trail of Tears

for the extraordinary hardship tribal members experienced

during this process.

A Quora user asks, What reasons did Andrew Jackson have

to move Native Americans to the west?

Andrew Jackson had been elected president in 1828,

and he made removing Indians from the south

the centerpiece of his first administration.

It was passed in 1830. It's called the Indian Removal Act.

Tribes fought this effort, but failed.

Jackson's motivations for doing so largely revolve,

not only around accessing Indian lands

and creating more prosperous plantation societies them,

but Jackson believed that all white American men

deserved suffrage in the country.

We call this Jacksonian democracy

because it was different from the prior practices

of political participation established during the founding.

For many decades, to vote and hold office

and be a part of the American body politic

required certain forms of property ownership.

Jackson made the everyday man his primary constituency,

and in doing so, created a racialized vision

of American citizenship and subjectivity

that was very different from recognition of Native Nations.

So their presence in many ways

particularly disturbed his understanding

of who constituted the rightful owners of the United States.

A Quora user asks,

Where did this whole silly stereotype

about Native Americans all living in teepees

and wearing feathers in their heads come from?

There are countless images of American Indians

in American history and popular culture.

The vast majority usually do conform

to very simplistic stereotypes,

that Native Americans are all the same,

that they live in similar dwellings

and dress in similar ways.

This is in fact counterfactual, but attest to the ubiquity

and the power of popular media to disseminate images

of Native Americans through things like magazines,

children's literature, movies, radio and television.

Images of Native Americans living in teepees

and wearing headdresses largely come from

Plains Indian cultures

across what are now the Dakota Territories into Montana,

Nebraska, Kansas, and even into the southern plains.

Many artists and photographers and later filmmakers

and anthropologists became particularly drawn

to these communities.

Some of these communities were in fact the most powerful

Native American political and military actors

in the 19th century,

so they retained vast autonomous homelands.

In those homelands,

Native Americans continue to hunt and travel

and reside in traditional ways,

and many of the first photographs, movies,

and other depictions of Native Americans

increasingly focused on these communities,

so much so that they became often synonymous

with Native America more broadly.

Moving on, what is a Native American powwow?

Native American powwows are gatherings

that celebrate Native American culture.

They include dances, as well as drum competitions and songs.

Native American dancers come together to honor themselves,

their families, their communities,

but even to honor the earth.

And so at these gatherings,

Native Americans create a powwow ground,

or a kind of central gathering space,

where before anything can happen,

Native American veterans and flag bearers bring tribal flags

together under honor song or a flag song,

and then dance competitions occur there afterward.

There are women's and men's categories,

including the Jingle Dress category,

which is particularly popular with younger women and girls,

that remember a time when Native American communities

began incorporating often canned goods

given to them by government agencies in the late 19th

and early 20th centuries.

These canned goods were cut and turned into jingles

thereafter to commemorate and/or celebrate

the survival of Indian traditions and customs.

Other dance categories include the grass dance

that shows dancers with regalia,

outfits that have often many grass strands,

often very colorful with head roaches

and feathers upon them.

These categories and dance styles

are diverse and distinctive,

but they become often very ubiquitous across Native America.

So much so that tribal communities across the United States

participate in powwow dances even when those dances

or those dance styles may not have been originally

indigenous to their own communities.

jakedwelderx3 asks, What's the Red Power Movement?

The Red Power Movement generally refers

to a period of American Indian political activism

across the 1960s.

It was fueled by a series of charismatic individuals,

nationally-organized associations

to condemn and try to reform corrupt

and broken federal Indian policies.

These activists were very good at getting media attention

and staging occupations and takeovers

and dramatic publicity stunts of various kinds,

including the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island.

But they had a harder time reforming laws, lobbying Congress

and instituting real change upon reservation communities.

Throughout the Cold War era,

the federal government increasingly attempted to move away

from its historic commitments that Native Americans.

And it instituted a policy known as termination,

whereby the federal government attempted to turn

essentially tribes over to states.

So anything associated with communal lifestyles

became increasingly suspicious

within many federal policy circles.

And these policies increasingly targeted Native nations,

so much so that native peoples organized

and instituted a movement known as Red Power

that sought a restoration of federal tribal relations.

It actually took a generation of reservation leaders

to carry those processes forward

and achieve the reform

that we often associate with the 1970s,

known as the era of American Indian self-determination.

That era followed the Red Power Movement,

but was really instituted by reservation leaders

who understood that the threats of the termination era

required concentrated forceful effort.

A Reddit user asks, Indian, Native American or indigenous?

Many within Native America prefer the term American Indian

because of its longstanding familiarity.

The term Indian appears in both

the US Declaration of Independence

as well as the US Constitution,

so we will never move past the term American Indian.

But more recently, the term Native American

and indigenous has gained popularity in usage

in order to move past the homogenizing elements

that the term Indian has sometimes held.

47D asks, I've heard that Native American nations

didn't have agriculture,

but I've also heard that Native Americans

taught the Puritans how to grow pumpkin, beans and corn.

One of the reasons people presume Native Americans

did not practice agriculture is because they were so skilled

at other forms of hunting and gathering.

Native Americans did have agriculture

before European arrival.

Many of the most important food crops in the world

came from Native American gardens,

particularly from Mesoamerican

or Central Mexican communities that first pioneered

the use of corn, beans, chilies, and even tomatoes.

So Native American communities

did possess agricultural economies,

but many did not, in places like the Northern Great Lakes.

But all communities both exchanged resources

and also complimented their hunting, fishing,

and gathering economies with various agricultural harvests.

So we should see these communities as complex civilizations

and part of a world that gave great bounties

to the rest of human society.

In fact, the corn beans and squash

raised by indigenous peoples complimented each other so well

that they created extraordinary bounties of surpluses

that could be widely traded

and help sustain newcomers such as the Puritans

or other English settlers.

A Quora user asks, Were there any wars

between Native American tribes before Europeans arrived?

The answer is yes, but not in the ways that we might assume.

Prior to the rival of Europeans,

Native Americans did not have guns.

They did not use horses in combat.

Generally speaking, Native American communities fought

in ritualized and localized engagements.

So the history of Native American warfare

became forever changed by the arrival of Europeans

who brought with them not only new technologies

of violence and warfare,

but radically disruptive influences,

particularly the introduction of European diseases

that raged across Native America

for generations following Columbus's arrival.

Next up, how have Native Americans

historically raised their children?

Well, there are many Native American tribes

and communities and cultures,

so it'd be hard to answer that in exact specificity.

In the American West,

tribal communities have crafted various cradle boards

or various forms of carrying devices

used to keep them with them

while they worked or maintained their families.

This is a smaller version of a Shoshone cradle board,

for example, that shows its woven hood

and its skin or hide body.

This is a miniature that was made for children to use

and play with so that they too could someday

prepare themselves to carry what, in this case, would be

a boy's hood.

The hoods are woven out of local grasses

and gathered materials

and would often include either a diamond

or an arrow figure to denote the gender of the baby.

And in the larger version, probably over a meter long,

a cradleboard like this would have been worn

by usually the mother

who would carry the infant upon it while she gathered,

harvested or did other forms of labor.

@justin_fowler33 asks, Okay, so how did Sacagawea

make it all the way to the West Coast?

Sacagawea is recruited in the winter of 1804 and 1805

when the Lewis and Clark party has made it all the way up

the Missouri River to the Mandan peoples

of what are now North Dakota.

They spent the winter there in this vibrant

trading community of many thousands of people.

Lewis and Clark understand that they're heading into a world

that very few Euro-Americans have ever ventured into.

The Missouri River is the longest river in North America.

It flows over 2000 miles

from its headwaters in Western Montana

until it reaches the Mississippi near St. Louis.

They've made it about halfway.

By June, however of 1805,

the expedition has reached the headwaters

and is stuck essentially in far western Montana.

They have no prior knowledge of this region,

and they spend several long weeks

in search of local Indians who can help them.

They eventually find some Eastern Shoshone Indians

who bring them into their community,

trade with them.

The leader of this community, his name is Cameahwait,

and he and Sacagawea embraced

after several years of separation.

It's not exactly clear how long she's been gone,

but she resides from and hails from this region,

and then helps the party translate

and obtain resources to continue going forward.

They see in this community Pacific salmon,

and they know then that they're not too far

from where the waters and the rivers will run west.

And they eventually travel through the headwaters

of the Columbia River all the way to the Pacific,

where they stay for the winter of 1805 and 1806.

Chicago or Sacagawea enables this important chapter

in the Lewis and Clark expedition,

and her legacy remains central

to the history of American exploration.

dijivu asked, Did the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee,

really use the seventh generation principle?

In Native America, Many tribes are known by one name,

but prefer their own names.

And so the Iroquois Confederacy is a widely understood term,

developed largely by outside commentators,

but the communities themselves use the term Haudenosaunee

to describe their community that predated European arrival.

Haudenosaunee means people of the longhouse,

which refers to political structures known as longhouses

within these communities.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy

predates the establishment in the United States

by at least three centuries.

The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee Confederacy

consists of five and later six different Native nations

who decided to come together to ensure peace, stability,

and prosperity among themselves.

They use principles or cultural values to guide them,

one of which is that they pledge a commitment

to ensuring that their principles

and actions of the current era will continue on

and improve the lives of those who follow after

for seven generations to come.

So this philosophy has guided and continues to guide

these communities' cultural practices

than Eastern North America.

A Reddit user asked, what was the motivation

behind American Indian boarding schools

Throughout the 19th century,

as the United States expanded across North America,

it continuously confronted powerful

and determined Native nations

with whom it had the difficult challenge

of incorporating into the American body politic.

Reservations, treaties, and various forms of separation

guided many generations of federal policy makers.

But after the Civil War, federal leaders began realizing

that they could dismantle the reservation system

if they could remove their children.

So starting in the 1870s

and going for 50 years thereafter,

the federal government instituted policies of child removal

that would take Native American children

from their homelands and raise them elsewhere,

forbid their language and cultural expressions,

institute various forms of Christian,

and/or individual ideologies upon them

and forced them essentially to learn English

and the American way of life

so that they could no longer remain tribal members.

This had a tragic outcome for Native Nations

as many tribal members lost touch with

and/or became distant from their families,

and many tribal nations had to work

for generations thereafter to incorporate

and rehabilitate many who were taken from them.

A Quora user asks, Why is Red Cloud largely forgotten

by history despite having governed a fifth

of what is now the United States?

I'm not sure Red Cloud governed a fifth

of the United States, but Red Cloud was

one of the American Indian leaders

who fought the United States to a standstill

in a battle known as Red Cloud's War, from 1866-1868.

Following the Civil War,

the United States entered into a series of military

and political conflicts with tribal communities,

including the Lakota who dominated

much of the Northern Plains.

Red Cloud and the Lakota communities

of what are now Western South Dakota

and Eastern Montana could organize

thousands of warriors when needed.

In the 1860s,

the federal government had just concluded the Civil War

and was trying to expand into the west

Red Cloud and other Lakota leaders

attacked and destroyed numerous forts

and essentially forced the federal government

to negotiate a settlement,

known as the Great Sioux Treaty of 1868,

that ended this war.

So the United States has fought

numerous Native American tribes and lost,

and has had to enter into political and military

diplomatic accords to conclude these wars.

Hubau asks, I've often seen Native American reservations

described as, quote, independent sovereign nations.

Why were they never given any of the things we associate

with independent nations, separate passports,

embassies in foreign capitals, seats at the United Nations,

the Olympics, et cetera?

Well, one can be an independent nation

and not have an Olympic team

and/or seat at the United Nations.

The independence in the international system

recognized nations does not have much recognition

or space for Native Nations at the moment,

but there are many native nations that are trying

to gain access into that world.

The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee Confederacy

does in fact issue passports for its members

who live often between the United States and Canada.

There is a restrained

or limited form of sovereignty established

by US constitutional law for Native Nations

so that they are not fully independent.

But they're sovereign nonetheless

and have authority over their lands

and those who travel upon them.

A Quora user asks, Did the United States ever lose a war

with Native American tribes?

Yes, the United States lost many wars

with Native American tribes,

including the defeat of the US Army in 1791

under the leadership of Arthur Sinclair,

when the early American government was attempting to conquer

what was then the Ohio Territory.

Confederated bans of Miami, Shawnee,

Wyandot and regional Indians organized

into a large military confederation

that defeated Sinclair in 1791

and mobilized then the army of the United States

that would come to the region and subsequently defeat them.

Next up, what is the Native American Church,

and why is it considered sometimes controversial?

The Native American Church or NAC

is a pan-tribal religious organization

that's spread across the United States

in the early 20th century.

It was often initiated by various medicine men

or leaders known as roadmen,

who would travel between American communities.

In the early 1900s,

tribal communities were particularly beleaguered.

Many confronted endemic poverty and underemployment.

Religious leaders, particularly from Oklahoma

and southwestern tribes, started bringing new practices,

beliefs, and also medicines with them,

including the use of the peyote plant and ritual.

Peyote is a psychedelic plant that originates

in North and Central Mexico,

and its buttons have been gathered and utilized

by indigenous peoples in Mexico for hundreds of years.

In ceremonies that blended both religious

and indigenous practices,

communities would often congregate and celebrate together

in ways that often threatened officials around them.

And so the persecution of the peyote plant

has become a particularly controversial aspect

of Native American religious history,

and tribal communities have fought to ensure

that tribal communities can utilize

medicinal products when needed.

A Reddit user asks,

Is the Native American population growing or not?

Across the 21st century,

Native American population has in fact

increased fairly dramatically,

and particularly in comparison to the previous century.

In the early 1900s, Native Americans numbered less

than a million across the United States,

and many speculated that these tribal communities

would not endure.

In fact, federal policy encouraged

the assimilation of Native Americans.

A century later now, in 2025,

Native Americans are estimated at between 4-6 million

in the United States and many more self-identify

as Native Americans across both the United States, Canada,

as well as Mexico.

So, tribal communities have increased dramatically

in the past 100 years

and stand positioned to ensure that their lands

and resources remain under their control and jurisdiction

for many generations to come.

Thank you for taking the time

to learn about Native American history.

Until next time.

[gentle upbeat music]