- 2 months ago
Native American historian Ned Blackhawk joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the cultures and histories of the indigenous peoples of North America. Why were reservations established and who lives on them? Do reservations have their own laws and police? How did What was the infamous "Trail of Tears?" What were conflicts between tribes like prior to the arrival of Europeans? Did the United States ever lose a war with a Native American tribe? What was agriculture and raising children like in native cultures? Answers to these questions and many more await on WIRED's Native American Support.
Director: Lauren Zeitoun
Director of Photography: Ben Dewey
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Ned Blackhawk
Creative Producer: Justin Wolfson
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicole Ford
Camera Operator: James Woodbury
Sound Mixer: Brett Van Deusen
Production Assistant: Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Additional Editor: Sam DiVito
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Director: Lauren Zeitoun
Director of Photography: Ben Dewey
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Ned Blackhawk
Creative Producer: Justin Wolfson
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicole Ford
Camera Operator: James Woodbury
Sound Mixer: Brett Van Deusen
Production Assistant: Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Additional Editor: Sam DiVito
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00I'm Ned Blackhawk, professor of history. I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.
00:04This is Native American support.
00:10A Reddit user asks, as a non-Native American, I don't really understand what a Native American
00:15reservation is. The term reservation comes from the lands that were reserved for Indians by the
00:21British government before the American Revolution and afterwards. The reservation system originated
00:26in the 19th century when the United States expanded dramatically from its former territorial
00:32boundaries across much of Western North America. In the process, the U.S. government entered into
00:38treaties with Native nations and in those treaties recognized many of their homelands and agreed to
00:45restrict white settlement or movement into them. Generally speaking, reservations are governed by
00:50tribal community members. They have constitutions, school and hospital and social welfare systems,
00:57police and national resource management. Tribal nations are self-governing upon their territories
01:02or upon their reservations where they have jurisdiction. So as a non-Native person, you cannot
01:07simply move into these domains unless you were perhaps related to or perhaps even married to a
01:12tribal member. Then together you could live within these communities.
01:16The Real JT asks, why are Native American casinos a thing? The short answer is American Indian casinos
01:25have been established by congressional law. The long answer is Native American casinos have evolved out
01:31of the sovereign authority that tribal communities have over their lands and the limited jurisdiction that
01:38municipal and state governments have upon them. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, as tribal communities were
01:43regaining the authority to develop new economies, expand their governments, fund various programs
01:50across their communities, they increasingly sought access to federal funding. Into the 1980s, however,
01:55limited federal funds began eroding those years of growth and many tribal nations started looking at
02:02other economic opportunities to help build and expand their economies. They started using their tax-exempt
02:11jurisdictional status to sell cigarettes or tobacco to offer bingo and related gaming facilities.
02:18Over time, that jurisdictional authority required Congress to intervene and establish state and tribal
02:26compacts so that casinos could be regulated, and that is what the Indian Gaming and Regulatory Act of 1988 did.
02:33There is some contention about the presence of casinos within Native American communities, but generally speaking,
02:38tribal communities have appreciated the economic opportunities that gaming facilities have provided,
02:44and have been trying to use the resources gained by gaming to build and expand other parts of their governments.
02:50A Quora user asks,
02:52Is there a correct map of the original boundaries of the United States and its tribal nations?
02:57It is often hard to find a single image of the contemporary Native nations of the United States,
03:03in part because very few of them have actually been rendered. I've tried in my recent work to show
03:09not just the federally recognized, but the state-recognized tribes that exist in the contiguous United States.
03:15And that map is found on the end pages of my recent book.
03:18This map shows the over 100 federally recognized tribes in California, the 38 in the state of Oklahoma,
03:24also the oldest continuously inhabited, not only tribal, but human societies in North America,
03:30the Pueblo Indians nations of New Mexico. These are the oldest continuously inhabited spots upon the American landscape.
03:38And when one sees these tribal communities or encounters them, one comes to gauge the depth and the complexity of Native American history.
03:47We cannot tell the history of the United States without these communities within them,
03:51and we must try as best as we can to incorporate our visions of America to locate them alongside it.
03:58At Art101.com asks,
04:00How did the Navajo Code Talkers contribute to the war?
04:04Navajo Code Talkers contributed to the successful completion of the Second World War in the Pacific Theater
04:10by helping to communicate military communications in their original languages, or in their Navajo or Diné language.
04:17They became deployed and organized largely in the Pacific Theater and served valiantly in the defense of their country and tribal nations.
04:25The Navajo language, known as Diné Bazad, is one of the most difficult languages to understand from the outside.
04:31And so there is no way Japanese intelligence officers could potentially crack the Navajo Code.
04:38One Reddit user asks,
04:40Could someone help me understand the Trail of Tears?
04:42The Trail of Tears refers to a period of Native American history
04:47when tribal nations across the American South were forcibly removed from their homelands by federal and local officials.
04:56Many fought to remain in their homelands, but were unsuccessful in doing so.
05:00So the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Muscogee Creek, the Seminole Nation, and the Chickasaw were marched to
05:08centers where they awaited deportation, often by riverboat, across the Mississippi to what was then known as the Indian Territory.
05:15This process led to the destruction of thousands of lives in hundreds of communities and is often generally referred to as the Trail of Tears
05:24for the extraordinary hardship tribal members experienced during this process.
05:30A Quora user asked, What reasons did Andrew Jackson have to move Native Americans to the West?
05:35Andrew Jackson had been elected president in 1828 and he made removing Indians from the South the centerpiece of his first administration.
05:43It was passed in 1830. It's called the Indian Removal Act.
05:46Tribes fought this effort, but failed.
05:48Jackson's motivations for doing so largely revolved not only around accessing Indian lands and creating more prosperous plantation societies upon them,
05:57but Jackson believed that all white American men deserve suffrage in the country.
06:03We call this Jacksonian democracy because it was different from the prior practices of political participation established during the founding.
06:13For many decades, to vote and hold office and be a part of the American body politic required certain forms of property ownership.
06:23Jackson made the everyday man his primary constituency.
06:27And in doing so created a racialized vision of American citizenship and subjectivity that was very different from recognition of Native nations.
06:37So their presence in many ways particularly disturbed his understanding of who constituted the rightful owners of the United States.
06:46A Quora user asks, Where did this whole silly stereotype about Native Americans all living in teepees and wearing feathers in their heads come from?
06:55There are countless images of American Indians in American history and popular culture.
07:01The vast majority usually do conform to very simplistic stereotypes that Native Americans are all the same, that they live in similar dwellings and dress in similar ways.
07:13This is in fact counterfactual, but attests to the ubiquity and the power of popular media to disseminate images of Native Americans through things like magazines, children's literature, movies, radio and television.
07:26Images of Native Americans living in teepees and wearing headdresses largely come from Plains Indian cultures across what are now the Dakota territories into Montana, Nebraska, Kansas and even into the Southern Plains.
07:38Many artists and photographers and later filmmakers and anthropologists became particularly drawn to these communities.
07:46Some of these communities were in fact the most powerful Native American political and military actors in the 19th century.
07:51So they retained vast autonomous homelands.
07:55In those homelands Native Americans continue to hunt and travel and reside in traditional ways.
08:01And many of the first photographs, movies and other depictions of Native Americans increasingly focused on these communities.
08:09So much so that they became often synonymous with Native America more broadly.
08:13Moving on, what is a Native American powwow?
08:16Native American powwows are gatherings that celebrate Native American culture.
08:21They include dances as well as drum competitions and songs.
08:25Native American dancers come together to honor themselves, their families, their communities, but even to honor the earth.
08:33And so at these gatherings Native Americans create a powwow ground or a kind of central gathering space where before anything can happen,
08:45Native American veterans and flag bearers bring tribal flags together under honor song or a flag song.
08:53And then dance competitions occur thereafter where there are women's and men's categories,
08:59including the jingle dress category, which is particularly popular with younger women and girls,
09:04that remember time when Native American communities began incorporating often canned goods given to them by government agencies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
09:15These canned goods were cut and turned into jingles thereafter to commemorate and or celebrate the survival of Indian traditions and customs.
09:25Other dance categories include the grass dance that shows dancers with regalia outfits that have often many grass strands,
09:33often very colorful with head roaches and feathers upon them.
09:37These categories and dance styles are diverse and distinctive, but they've become often very ubiquitous across Native America,
09:45so much so that tribal communities across the United States participate in powwow dances,
09:50even when those dances or those dance styles may not have been originally indigenous to their own communities.
09:55Jake D Welder III asks,
09:59What's the Red Power Movement?
10:00The Red Power Movement generally refers to a period of American Indian political activism across the 1960s.
10:07It was fueled by a series of charismatic individuals, nationally organized associations to condemn and try to reform corrupt and broken federal Indian policies.
10:20These activists were very good at getting media attention and staging occupations and takeovers and dramatic publicity stunts of various kinds,
10:29including the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island.
10:32But they had a harder time reforming laws, lobbying Congress, and instituting real change upon reservation communities.
10:40Throughout the Cold War era, the federal government increasingly attempted to move away from its historic commitments to Native Americans.
10:47And it instituted a policy known as termination, whereby the federal government attempted to turn essentially tribes over to states.
10:54So anything associated with communal lifestyles became increasingly suspicious within many federal policy circles.
11:01And these policies increasingly targeted Native nations, so much so that Native peoples organized and instituted a movement known as Red Power,
11:11but sought a restoration of federal tribal relations.
11:15It actually took a generation of reservation leaders to carry those processes forward and achieve the reform that we often associate with the 1970s known as the era of American Indian self-determination.
11:30That era followed the Red Power Movement, but was really instituted by reservation leaders who understood that the threats of the termination era required concentrated, forceful effort.
11:43A Reddit user asks, Indian, Native American, or Indigenous?
11:47Many within Native America prefer the term American Indian because of its long-standing familiarity.
11:53The term Indian appears in both the U.S. Declaration of Independence as well as the U.S. Constitution.
11:58So we will never move past the term American Indian.
12:02But more recently, the term Native American and Indigenous has gained popularity and usage in order to move past the homogenizing elements that the term Indian has sometimes held.
12:1447D asks, I've heard that Native American nations didn't have agriculture, but I've also heard that Native Americans taught the Puritans how to grow pumpkin, beans, and corn.
12:23One of the reasons people presume Native Americans did not practice agriculture is because they were so skilled at other forms of hunting and gathering.
12:33Native Americans did have agriculture before European arrival.
12:36Many of the most important food crops in the world came from Native American gardens, particularly from Mesoamerican or Central Mexican communities that first pioneered the use of corn, beans, chiles, and even tomatoes.
12:50So Native American communities did possess agricultural economies, but many did not in places like the northern Great Lakes.
12:58But all communities both exchanged resources and also complemented their hunting, fishing, and gathering economies with various agricultural harvests.
13:06So we should see these communities as complex civilizations and part of a world that gave great bounties to the rest of human society.
13:15In fact, the corn, beans, and squash raised by indigenous peoples complemented each other so well that they created extraordinary bounties of surpluses that could be widely traded and help sustain newcomers such as the Puritans or other English settlers.
13:30Quora user asks, were there any wars between Native American tribes before Europeans arrived?
13:36The answer is yes, but not in the ways that we might assume.
13:39Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans did not have guns.
13:44They did not use horses in combat.
13:46Generally speaking, Native American communities fought in ritualized and localized engagements.
13:51So the history of Native American warfare became forever changed by the arrival of Europeans who brought with them not only new technologies of violence and warfare, but radically disruptive influences, particularly the introduction of European diseases that raged across Native America for generations following Columbus's arrival.
14:10Next up, how have Native Americans historically raised their children?
14:13Well, there are many Native American tribes and communities and cultures, so it'd be hard to answer that in exact specificity.
14:20In the American West, tribal communities have crafted various cradle boards or various forms of carrying devices used to keep them with them while they worked or maintained their families.
14:32This is a smaller version of a Shoshone cradle board, for example, that shows its woven hood and its skin or hide body.
14:43This is a miniature that was made for children to use and play with so that they too could someday prepare themselves to carry what in this case would be a boy's hood.
14:55The hoods are woven out of local grasses and gathered materials and would often include either a diamond or an arrow figure to denote the gender of the baby.
15:06And in the larger version, probably over a meter long, a cradle board like this would have been worn by usually the mother who would carry the infant upon it while she gathered, harvested or did other forms of labor.
15:21At Justin Fowler 33 asks, OK, so how did Sacagawea make it all the way to the West Coast?
15:28Sacagawea is recruited in the winter of 1804 and 1805 when the Lewis and Clark party has made it all the way up the Missouri River to the Mandan peoples of what are now North Dakota.
15:41They spend the winter there in this vibrant trading community of many thousands of people.
15:47Lewis and Clark understand that they're heading into a world that very few Euro-Americans have ever ventured into.
15:54The Missouri River is the longest river in North America.
15:57It flows over 2,000 miles from its headwaters in western Montana until it reaches the Mississippi near St. Louis.
16:04They've made it about halfway. By June, however, of 1805, the expedition has reached the headwaters and is stuck essentially in far western Montana.
16:15They have no prior knowledge of this region and they spend several long weeks in search of local Indians who can help them.
16:24They eventually find some Eastern Shoshone Indians who bring them into their community, trade with them.
16:30The leader of this community, his name is Kameowait and he and Sacagawea embrace after several years of separation.
16:37It's not exactly clear how long she's been gone, but she resides from and hails from this region and then helps the party translate and obtain resources to continue going forward.
16:48They see in this community Pacific salmon and they know then that they are not too far from where the waters and the rivers will run west.
16:56And they eventually travel through the headwaters of the Columbia River all the way to the Pacific where they stay for the winter of 1805 and 1806.
17:03Sacagawea or Sacagawea enables this important chapter in the Lewis and Clark expedition and her legacy remains central to the history of American exploration.
17:13Digivu asked, did the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee really use the seventh generation principle?
17:19In Native America, many tribes are known by one name, but prefer their own names.
17:25And so the Iroquois Confederacy is a widely understood term developed largely by outside commentators.
17:31But the communities themselves use the term Haudenosaunee to describe their community that predated European arrival.
17:39Haudenosaunee means people of the longhouse, which refers to political structures known as longhouses within these communities.
17:46The Haudenosaunee Confederacy predates the establishment of the United States by at least three centuries.
17:51The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee Confederacy consists of five and later six different Native nations
17:57who decided to come together to ensure peace, stability and prosperity among themselves.
18:03They use principles or cultural values to guide them.
18:06One of which is that they pledge a commitment to ensuring that their principles and actions of the current era will continue on
18:16and improve the lives of those who follow after for seven generations to come.
18:21So this philosophy has guided and continues to guide these communities' cultural practices in Eastern North America.
18:29A Reddit user asked, what was the motivation behind American Indian boarding schools?
18:33Throughout the 19th century, as the United States expanded across North America,
18:37it continuously confronted powerful and determined Native nations with whom it had the difficult challenge of incorporating into the American body politic.
18:46Reservations, treaties and various forms of separation guided many generations of federal policymakers.
18:54But after the Civil War, federal leaders began realizing that they could dismantle the reservation system if they could remove their children.
19:02So starting in the 1870s and going for 50 years thereafter,
19:05the federal government instituted policies of child removal that would take Native American children from their homelands and raise them elsewhere,
19:12forbid their language and cultural expressions, institute various forms of Christian and or individual ideologies upon them,
19:19and force them essentially to learn English and the American way of life so that they could no longer remain tribal members.
19:26This had a tragic outcome for Native nations as many tribal members lost touch with and or became distant from their families.
19:35And many tribal nations had to work for generations thereafter to incorporate and rehabilitate many who were taken from them.
19:44A Quora user asked, why is Red Cloud largely forgotten by history despite having governed a fifth of what is now the United States?
19:51I'm not sure Red Cloud governed a fifth of the United States,
19:54but Red Cloud was one of the American Indian leaders who fought the United States to a standstill in a battle known as Red Cloud's War from 1866 to 1868.
20:04Following the Civil War, the United States entered into a series of military and political conflicts with tribal communities,
20:11including the Lakota, who dominated much of the Northern Plains.
20:15Red Cloud and the Lakota communities of what are now Western South Dakota and Eastern Montana could organize thousands of warriors when needed.
20:24In the 1860s, the federal government had just concluded the Civil War and was trying to expand into the West.
20:30Red Cloud and other Lakota leaders attacked and destroyed numerous forts
20:35and essentially forced the federal government to negotiate a settlement known as the Great Sioux Treaty of 1868 that ended this war.
20:43So the United States has fought numerous Native American tribes and lost
20:48and has had to enter into political and military diplomatic accords to conclude these wars.
20:54Hubo asks, I've often seen Native American reservations described as, quote, independent sovereign nations.
21:01Why were they never given any of the things we associate with independent nations?
21:05Separate passports, embassies and foreign capitals, seats at the United Nations, the Olympics, etc.
21:10Well, one can be an independent nation and not have an Olympic team and or seat at the United Nations.
21:15The independence in the international system of recognized nations does not have much recognition or space for Native nations at the moment,
21:23but there are many Native nations that are trying to gain access into that world.
21:27The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee Confederacy does, in fact, issue passports for its members who live often between the United States and Canada.
21:34There is a restrained or limited form of sovereignty established by U.S. constitutional law for Native nations so that they are not fully independent,
21:44but they are sovereign nonetheless and have authority over their lands and those who travel upon them.
21:49A Quora user asks, did the United States ever lose a war with Native American tribes?
21:54Yes, the United States lost many wars with Native American tribes, including the defeat of the U.S. Army in 1791 under the leadership of Arthur Sinclair,
22:05when the early American government was attempting to conquer what was then the Ohio Territory.
22:10Confederated bands of Miami, Shawnee, Wendat and regional Indians organized into a large military confederation that defeated Sinclair in 1791
22:21and mobilized then the army of the United States that would come to the region and subsequently defeat them.
22:26Next up, what is the Native American church and why is it considered sometimes controversial?
22:31The Native American church, or NAC, is a pan-tribal religious organization that spread across the United States in the early 20th century.
22:40It was often initiated by various medicine men or leaders known as roadmen who would travel between Native American communities.
22:47In the early 1900s, tribal communities were particularly beleaguered. Many confronted endemic poverty and underemployment.
22:54Religious leaders, particularly from Oklahoma and Southwestern tribes, started bringing new practices, beliefs and also medicines with them,
23:03including the use of the peyote plant and ritual.
23:06Peyote is a psychedelic plant that originates in North and Central Mexico,
23:11and its buttons have been gathered and utilized by Indigenous peoples in Mexico for hundreds of years.
23:16And so in ceremonies that blended both religious and Indigenous practices,
23:20communities would often congregate and celebrate together in ways that often threatened officials around them.
23:27And so the persecution of the peyote plant has become a particularly controversial aspect of Native American religious history,
23:34and tribal communities have fought to ensure that tribal communities can utilize medicinal products when needed.
23:42A Reddit user asks, is the Native American population growing or not?
23:47Across the 21st century, Native American population has in fact increased fairly dramatically,
23:52and particularly in comparison to the previous century.
23:55In the early 1900s, Native Americans numbered less than a million across the United States,
23:59and many speculated that these tribal communities would not endure.
24:03In fact, federal policy encouraged the assimilation of Native Americans.
24:06A century later now, in 2025, Native Americans are estimated at between 4 to 6 million in the United States,
24:13and many more self-identify as Native Americans across both the United States, Canada, as well as Mexico.
24:20So, tribal communities have increased dramatically in the past hundred years,
24:25and stand positioned to ensure that their lands and resources remain under their control and jurisdiction for many generations to come.
24:34Thank you for taking the time to learn about Native American history.
24:37Until next time.
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