Nina M. Versaggi, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Cultural resource management archaeologists don't choose where they dig. Instead they identify, evaluate and preserve cultural heritage sites in locations slated for development.
This clay facial reconstruction of Kennewick Man, carefully sculpted around the morphological features of his skull, suggests how he may have looked alive nearly 9,000 years ago.
Brittney Tatchell, Smithsonian Institution
A 9,000-year-old skeleton became a high-profile and highly contested case for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. How do we respectfully deal with ancient human remains?
Native Americans have struggled for recognition of the violence done to them through colonisation and the persistent harms of settler colonialism.
EPA/Mike Nelson
Despite significant shortcomings in the negotiation, content and honouring of treaties, they continue to define the nature of the relationship between most Native Americans and the United States.
What would a 19th-century American think of Donald Trump’s hair?
Gary Cameron/Reuters
Many groups have been labeled 'enemy' in the American past. A literary scholar looks at the role literature and philosophy have played in dispelling fears and shifting public attitudes.
What is the history of the Thanksgiving dinner?
Nast, Thomas, 1840-1902, Library of Congress
The canonization of an 18th century Spanish priest is causing controversy given the suffering of Native Americans in California's missions. But there's a bigger issue at stake here for the church.
The tallest mountain in the US is again called Denali.
Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS
For millennia, the Koyukon Athabascan have called the 20,000-foot mountain "the tall one."
Members of the Chitimacha language team (from left to right) Sam Boutte, Kim Walden and Rachel Vilcan use the new language software for the first time.
A genomic sequencing study suggesting that the 9,000-year old skeleton dubbed "Kennewick Man" was Native American will intensify a 20-year-old dispute about what should happen to the remains.
Visitors mourn at the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia.
David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters
On the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, we asked scholars to reflect on the significance of Armenian insistence on remembering and Turkey's insistence that the genocide never happened.
Drawings by male warriors – like Black Hawk’s ‘Dream or Vision or Himself Changed to a Destroyer or Riding a Bufalo Eagle (1880-1881)’ – often depicted visions perceived during meditation and fasting.
New York State Historical Association, Fenimore Art Museum/John Bigelow Taylor
More than a century after he died, the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse, who famously fought General Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn, is thought of as transcendent force – attuned to the universe in a…
In 1984, British LGBT rights groups worked on behalf of striking miners.
Flickr
The film Pride, which won the Queer Palm Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is based on the true story of what seems to be a rare occurrence in human history: two oppressed groups (in this case…
The discovery of a nearly complete fossil skeleton of a teenage girl in the Hoyo Negro submerged cave system in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula provides new insight into the first people to inhabit the Americas…
An Inupiat Eskimo family from Alaska in 1929, whose ancestors would have crossed Beringia thousands of years previously.
Edward Curtis
The theory that the Americas were populated by humans crossing from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge was first proposed as far back as 1590, and has been generally accepted since the 1930s. But genetic…
Since Europeans first arrived in the Americas, native peoples have been decimated. In North America, where assimilation was rare and conquest or theft of land has been the norm, things were particularly…