Native American West

How the West Was Drawn explores the geographic and historical experiences of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas during the European and American contest for imperial control of the Great Plains during the 18th and 19th centuries. David Bernstein argues that the American West was a collaborative construction between Native peoples and Euro-American empires that developed cartographic processes and culturally specific maps, which in turn reflected encounter and conflict between settler states and indigenous peoples.

In 1783, with the signing of the Peace of Paris, the American Revolution was complete. And yet even as the newly independent United States secured peace with Great Britain, it found itself losing an escalating military conflict on its borderlands. The enemy was the indigenous people of the Ohio Valley, who rightly saw the new nation as a threat to their existence.

David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi - the name means "enemy ancestors" in Navajo - who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism.

An epic struggle over land, water, and power is erupting in the American West and the halls of Washington, DC. It began when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas.

The dramatic and tragic story of the only successful Native American uprising against the Spanish, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

Journey back to the very first Thanksgiving Day, when two societies came together to feast and honor the earth's bounty in peace.