Native American Culture

Training methods for tracking and wilderness observation woven into extraordinary real-life stories of intuitive animal-reading skills Explains technical tracking methods and observational skills such as shadowing and envisioning through the innermost thoughts of an accomplished native...

Daniel is a young Métis man searching for a way to exist in a world of lateral violence, intergenerational trauma and systemic racism. Facing obstacles of his own at every turn, he observes and learns from the lived realities of his family members, friends, teachers and lovers. He finds hope in...

James Welch never shied away from depicting the lives of Native Americans damned by destiny and temperament to the margins of society. The Death of Jim Loney is no exception. Jim Loney is a mixed-blood, of white and Indian parentage. Estranged from both communities, he lives a solitary, brooding...

Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology, Chip Colwell navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. His book reveals a dramatic process that involves negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.

You may know of Pocahontas, but there is more to her story. Learn about life in the time that Pocahontas lived, and how she impacted the First Colonies.

Discover the soul, spirit, and history of the great Native American heritage—plus the healing power of Earth's medicine through traditional herbalism.

A note is left on a car windshield, an old dog dies, and Kent Nerburn finds himself back on the Lakota reservation where he traveled more than a decade before with a tribal elder named Dan. The touching, funny, and haunting journey that ensues goes deep into reservation boarding-school mysteries, the dark confines of sweat lodges, and isolated Native homesteads far back in the Dakota hills in search of ghosts that have haunted Dan since childhood.

It's no surprise that the Shawnee continue to be closely associated with their most famous leader, Tecumseh, the most famous Native American of the early 19th century. While leading the Shawnee, he attempted to peacefully establish a Native American nation east of the Mississippi River in the wake of the American Revolution. Together with his brother Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh was in the process of forming a wide-ranging, Native American confederacy that they hoped would stem the westward flow of Anglo-American settlers.

From the "Trail of Tears" to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, the narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the first contact between natives and settlers, tribes like the Sioux, Cherokee, and Navajo have both fascinated and perplexed outsiders with their history, language, and culture.

Among Native American tribes, the Sioux are one of the best known and most important. Participants in some of the most famous and notorious events in American history, the history of the Sioux is replete with constant reminders of the consequences of both their accommodation of and resistance to American incursions into their territory by pioneering white settlers pushing further westward during the 19th century.

Though they are not as well known as tribes like the Sioux or Cherokee, the Creek are one of the oldest and most important Native American tribes in North America. With roots that tie them to the Ancient Moundbuilders, the Creek were one of the most established groups in the Southeastern United States, and came to be known as one of the Five Civilized Tribes. It's also believed that the Creek were the first natives encountered by Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto's historic expedition in the mid-16th century.

From the "Trail of Tears" to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, the narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the first contact between natives and settlers, tribes like the Sioux, Cherokee, and Navajo have both fascinated and perplexed outsiders with their history, language, and culture.

Apple is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly red on the outside, white on the inside. Eric Gansworth tells his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

From the “Trail of Tears” to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, the narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the first contact between natives and settlers, tribes like the Sioux, Cherokee, and Navajo have both fascinated and perplexed outsiders with their history, language, and culture.

The Utes are a Native American people who live today in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, and they currently have the second-largest Indian reservation in the United States. However, these holdings are relatively small fragments of the original Ute land base. The Utes were a fierce warrior people who fought hard to defend their land against Spaniards and later the Americans, but they remain much less well-known among the American public than many other Native American nations.

For centuries, the Comanche thrived in a territory called Comancheria, which comprised parts of eastern New Mexico, southern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, southern Kansas, Oklahoma, and some of northwest Texas. Before conflicts with white settlers began in earnest, it's been estimated that the tribe consisted of more than 40,000 members. While the Comanche are still a federally recognized nation today and live on a reservation in part of Oklahoma, they have remained a well-known tribe due to their 19th century notoriety.

One of the most influential Native American tribes on the Great Plains was the Arapaho, a group so renowned among neighboring Native Americans that it's believed their name came from a Pawnee word for "trader. Like other notable Plains tribes, the Arapaho split off from other groups around the 16th-17th centuries and shifted from a sedentary agricultural society to the kind of nomadic group many envision when thinking of groups on the Plains.

Though not as well known as the Cherokee, one of the Five Civilized Tribes was the Chickasaw. With roots that tie them to the Ancient Moundbuilders, the Chickasaw were one of the most established groups in the Southeastern United States, and they were among the first natives encountered by Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto's historic expedition in the mid-16th century.

From the Trail of Tears to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, the narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Among all the Native American tribes, the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans learned the hard way that the warriors of the Apache were among the fiercest in North America. Based in the Southwest, the Apache fought all three in Mexico and the American Southwest, engaging in seasonal raids for so many centuries that the Apache struck fear into the hearts of all their neighbors. Given the group's reputation, it's fitting that they are inextricably associated with one of their most famous leaders, Geronimo.