Native American History

Chief Washakie, born at the dawn of the 19th century, emerged as a significant figure in the history of the American West. His life spanned a century of profound change for Native American tribes, particularly the Eastern Shoshone. Born in the Bitterroot Mountains to a Salish father and Lemhi Shoshone…

Native American dwellings—wigwams, tipis, and pueblos—represent three of the most recognized forms of traditional Native American housing. They are only a fraction of the full architectural story. Across a continent stretching from Arctic tundra to subtropical swamp, from Pacific rainforest to Southwestern desert, Indigenous peoples built homes that fit their…

Before the printing press reached North America. Before notaries and seals and leather-bound ledgers. Before European diplomats arrived with their iron-chain metaphors and ink-blotted parchment. The Haudenosaunee were already keeping records — tight, intricate, permanent records — in the bodies of clams. Wampum belts are among the most misread objects…

The Navajo Skinwalkers: History, Mythology, and Truth is a subject that sits at the intersection of genuine cultural belief, centuries of oral tradition, and a modern appetite for the supernatural. For the Diné, the people the outside world calls Navajo, the figure known as the yee naaldlooshii is not a…

The pattern board shows only half a face. In the Chilkat weaving tradition, a Tlingit carver—always a man, by convention—paints the left side of a crest animal onto a flat wooden plank: a killer whale, a raven, a thunderbird, rendered in the ancient visual grammar of ovoids, U-forms, and S-curves…

The canoe weighed less than a white-tailed deer. It could carry ten men and six hundred pounds of furs across open water, then be lifted onto a single person’s shoulders and walked around a waterfall. No European shipwright in the seventeenth century could explain how that was possible. Some of…