Native Peoples of North America

Course Description

In partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, this 24-lecture course dismantles myths and reveals the continuous, dynamic presence of Native nations from pre-contact to the present. Award-winning historian Daniel M. Cobb reframes familiar events—Columbus, the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, the New Deal, both World Wars, Wounded Knee, and modern sovereignty struggles—through Indigenous perspectives. You will learn how Native peoples resisted conquest, negotiated treaties, adapted to new economies, served in foreign wars, and reasserted political sovereignty through courts, activism, and cultural revitalization. By the final lecture, you will see American history not as a single narrative, but as a braided stream of stories in which Native nations remain decisive actors.

Lecture-by-Lecture Outline

1. Native America: A Story of Survival – 38 min

Beyond the myth of the “vanishing Indian,” discover vibrant cultures that endure.

2. The Columbian Exchange: New Worlds for All – 31 min

Plants, animals, microbes, and cuisines reshaped continents and power relations.

3. The Native South and Southwest in the 1600s – 32 min

De Soto’s entrada and the Pueblo War for Independence.

4. Werowocomoco and Montaup in the 1600s – 30 min

Objects and diplomacy in early Native-European encounters.

• Iroquoia and Wendake in the 1600s – 29 min

Haudenosaunee and Wendat strategies for measured separatism.

• Indian-European Encounters, 1700–1750 – 32 min

Treaties, trade, and the shifting balance of power.

• The Seven Years’ War in Indian Country – 30 min

Native perspectives on a global conflict.

8. The American Revolution through Native Eyes – 31 min

Allies, neutrals, and civil wars within Indigenous nations.

• Indian Resistance in the Ohio Country – 31 min

Treaty of Paris fallout and the struggle for the Northwest.

10. Indian Removal: Many Trails, Many Tears – 32 min

Cherokee legal battles and the politics of forced relocation.

11. Native Transformations on the Great Plains – 29 min

Horses, guns, and new economies after Lewis and Clark.

12. Indians, Manifest Destiny, and Uncivil Wars – 33 min

Expansion, the Civil War, and Indigenous homelands.

13. Native Resistance in the West, 1850s–1870s – 32 min

Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the fight for the Plains.

14. The Last Indian Wars? – 31 min

Geronimo, Chief Joseph, and the closing of the frontier.

15. Challenging Assimilation and Allotment – 32 min

Boarding schools, Dawes Act, and strategies of cultural survival.

16. American Indians and the Law, 1883–1903 – 30 min

Standing Bear, Lone Wolf, and landmark court cases.

17. The Ghost Dance and the Peyote Road – 31 min

Spiritual movements of renewal and resistance.

• Native America in the Early 1900s – 33 min

Writers, athletes, and public intellectuals defy stereotypes.

• American Indians and World War I – 31 min

Citizenship, service, and the paradox of defending a hostile state.

20. Making a New Deal in Native America – 33 min

Tribal self-government and the Indian New Deal.

21. American Indians and World War II – 31 min

Code talkers, urban migration, and the atomic age.

• Indian Termination or Self-Determination? – 35 min

Cold War politics and the fight for treaty rights.

23. Native Radicalism and Reform, 1969–1978 – 32 min

Alcatraz, Trail of Broken Treaties, and Wounded Knee II.

24. Reasserting Rights and Tribal Sovereignty – 40 min

Gaming, repatriation, and the future of Indigenous self-rule.