Many thousands of years before Christopher Columbus’ ships landed in the Bahamas, a different group of people discovered America: the nomadic ancestors of modern Native Americans who hiked over a “land bridge” from Asia to what is now Alaska more than 12,000 years ago. In fact, ...read more

In 1879, U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt opened a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But it wasn’t the kind of boarding school that rich parents send their children to. Rather, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a government-backed institution that ...read more

Do U.S. citizenship and voting rights go hand and hand? For most of the country’s history, the answer has been no—just look at the example of Native voting rights, which weren’t secured in all states until the 1960s. Native Americans couldn’t be U.S. citizens when the country ...read more

“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” That was the mindset under which the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. Decades later, those words—delivered in a speech by U.S. ...read more

Enslavement. Exploitation. Discrimination. Violence. Forced removal. Genocide. Despite inhabiting California for thousands of years, Native Americans faced all of this and more at the hands of California’s white settlers and the state’s government itself. Now, California ...read more

From the moment English colonists arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, they shared an uneasy relationship with the Native Americans (or Indians) who had thrived on the land for thousands of years. At the time, millions of indigenous people were scattered across North America ...read more

They came from near and far: Native American chiefs and representatives of various tribes bearing gifts for a historic meeting. Their destination was Fort Niagara in New York, where dozens of Nations would meet to negotiate a new alliance with the British. Months earlier, in ...read more

When photographer Edward S. Curtis moved out west to Washington state in 1887, he used his camera to capture the experiences of?Native Americans. Over the span of 30 years, Curtis documented over 80 tribes west of the Mississippi, from the Mexican border to northern Alaska. ...read more

Russia’s mountainous Altai Republic borders China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Inhabited since the Paleolithic, the region is barely larger than Maine but served as a vital gateway to Siberia and the cradle of widespread human lineages found across northern Eurasia. “It’s a place ...read more