Native American Indians are committed to making Indigenous Peoples Day a national holiday in 2024.

This inquiry lesson provides primary and secondary sources, maps, images, background history, and objects from our collection to offer teachers and students insight into California Native American resilience during the Spanish mission period.

Despite efforts to eliminate the Indigenous peoples of California during its gold rush, many survived to tell their stories.

Exhibition of Narrative Art Shows More than a Century of Native Life on the Plains.

A pendant more than 1,000 years old immortalizes Mayan maize god Hun Hunahpu.

On the 80th anniversary of this D-Day, descendants of Comanche code talkers returned to Utah Beach to honor their relatives who fought in this deadly battle.

Dr. Khal Schneider (Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria) explores the complex history behind the California gold rush and its impact on the Native peoples of California.

This recorded webinar walks teachers through the online lesson "The Impact of the Gold Rush on Native Americans of California" and shares recommended extension options for educators with additional time in their curricula.

This inquiry lesson provides primary and secondary sources, maps, images, background history, and objects from our collection to offer teachers and students insight into California Native American resilience during the Spanish mission period.

This inquiry resource provides evidence to help teachers and students dispel the myth of the “First Thanksgiving.”

Speakers mark the centennial of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which declared all Indians born in the United States as citizens of the country.

A century after photographer Edward S. Curtis photographed American Indian tribes in the western United States and Alaska, his great-grandson is photographing their descendants and recording their stories.

This document signed in 1818 serves as a reminder of the unfairness of the federal government's approach to negotiating with Native communities.

From Cherokee to Shawnee to Shoshone-Bannock and others, the traditions and beliefs marking an eclipse reveal close connections to the planets.

This online resource shows how colonization and the American Revolution greatly reduced Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) territory. It explores the shape and scope of Haudenosaunee land before, during, and after the war.

This inquiry lesson provides primary sources, maps, images, and background history to offer teachers and students insight into a little-known but vitally important aspect of one of the most iconic events in American history—the California gold rush. .

In this four-part professional development series, educators will explore how to teach about treaties and their relevance today.

This online storybook explores the history and contemporary life of the Pamunkey people.

Historians honor Osage sisters who leaped into ballet history.

During an internship at NMAI, history major Maddie Henderson sought to learn more about the Indian boarding school era and how forced assimilation has affected cultural practices generations later, including within her own family.

This interactive features illustrated stories of the strategies that American Indian leaders from six different nations used in their attempts to keep their homelands.

This interactive uses primary sources, quotes, images, animations, and short videos of contemporary Muscogee people to tell the story of the Muscogee Nation's experience before, during, and after removal.

Treaties define the sovereign relationship between the United States and American Indian Nations.

This online lesson provides Native perspectives, images, documents, and other sources to help students and teachers understand the difficult choices and consequences the Pawnee Nation faced when entering into treaty negotiations with the United States.

This interactive uses primary sources, quotes, images, and short videos of contemporary Cherokee people to tell the story of how the Cherokee Nation resisted removal and persisted to renew and rebuild their nation.

This online lesson provides Native perspectives, images, documents, and other sources to help students and teachers understand the remarkable nature of the Navajo Treaty of 1868 and why the Navajo maintained an unflinching resolve to return home.

This short film tells emotionally resonant stories from Native American veterans from across the United States Armed Forces with diverse viewpoints and personal testimony about their service.

U.S. Navy names a ship after Alaska Native veteran Solomon Atkinson, one of the first Navy SEALs.

The U.S. government took land from the Oglala Lakota people in South Dakota for a World War II bombing range. Eight decades later, this tribe is still left with the perilous task of cleaning it up.

A look back at the long-awaited dedication ceremony and celebration weekend of the National Native American Veterans Memorial on the National Mall.

This treaty was negotiated 11 months after the Sand Creek Massacre that took place on November 29, 1864, a day that will live in infamy in the lives of modern Cheyenne and Arapaho people.

A California Indigenous woman partners with a Smithsonian ethnologist to immortalize her Rumsen people’s stories.

A series of events led to the Wounded Knee occupation, one of the most significant being the Trail of Broken Treaties.

Native friends share their celebrations, memorials, and gatherings during the winter holiday season.

A tribal historic preservation officer talks about his critical but challenging role.

A print of a sleigh being pulled by a reindeer created by Iñupiaq artist Carl Hank captures a complicated convergence of histories.

Award-winning journalist Rebecca Nagle (Citizen of the Cherokee Nation) explains that tribal sovereignty is the inherent authority of Indigenous tribes to govern themselves.

In part one of this webinar, participants learned about different aspects of sovereignty, including non-political components such as cultural autonomy.

In part two of this webinar, participants heard from museum education staff about ways to teach tribal sovereignty to their students.

Jennie Ross Cobb, the first known Native American female photographer, captured some of the earliest images of life in a Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory.

During World War II, Japanese troops overtook Attu Island and took its Aleut inhabitants to Japan. The descendants of those prisoners are reuniting and reclaiming their culture.

For thousands of years, Native Hawaiians have traveled the Pacific in traditional voyaging canoes.

This virtual symposium explored the hidden stories of enslaved Indigenous peoples, focusing on the legacy of Spanish colonization in the Americas and Asia and its impact on what is now the southwestern United States.

The Thanksgiving story deeply rooted in America’s school curriculum frames the Pilgrims as the main characters and reduces the Wampanoag Indians to supporting roles. It also erases a monumentally sad history. The true history of Thanksgiving begins with the Indians.

Taffy Abel, US hockey’s first American Indian player, won a silver medal at the inaugural Winter Games almost a century ago.

Although current views may point to “political correctness” for changes in language and terminology, this is not something new.

Remembering the humanity of Indigenous peoples on International Human Rights Day.

This book explores the events surrounding the original feast at Plimoth from a Native perspective.

Duane Hollow Horn Bear (Sicangu Lakota), a member of the Lakota Studies Department at Sinte Gleska University and the great-grandson of one of the warriors who fought at Little Bighorn, talks about the values that guided the warriors there.

This webinar focused on three vastly divergent federal Indian policies and their positive and negative impacts on Native nations historically and today.

This webinar examined why an understanding of the history of U.S. federal Indian policy is critical to understanding the relationship between Native nations and the United States today.

This webinar considered how U.S. federal Indian policies impact people and communities on a personal level.

This video shares how the National Museum of the American Indian's resources can be used for research in the National History Day competition.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars question whether the human factor was deadlier than the actual disease in the historic epidemics that depopulated the Indigenous Western Hemisphere.

This 75-minute teacher webinar focused on the ways in which the Maya have used the Sun to track time for thousands of years.

Indigenous people find ways to connect to culture and each other, even far from their communities.

Looking at the multiple layers of New York’s long history.

The Shinnecock Indian Nation has held onto its land despite encroachment by affluent Hampton residents. Now its sovereignty is coming due.

An NMAI exhibition takes visitors on an immersive journey to discover why this state is an Indigenous place.

Young Native activists address the tension between history, memory, and the current movements happening across America.

Kiowa tribal member Dennis Zotigh pays respect to the veterans who served during the Korean conflict, and especially to the three Kiowa soldiers who gave their lives there.

The story of Cora Elm (Wisconsin Oneida) and Edith Anderson (Grand River Mohawk), veterans of the Nurse Corps of the Army Medical Department in France during 1918.

Charles Shay (Penobscot) performs a smudging ceremony at the annual D-Day observances in Normandy, France, in honor of the 175 American Indians who landed that day.

Ernest Childers (Muscogee Creek) became the first American Indian to win the Congressional Medal of Honor in World War II.

Written on paper from an army ledger book, the Navajo Nation Treaty reunited the Navajo with a portion of the land taken from them by the U.S. government.

The broad strokes of Pocahontas’s biography are well known—unusually so for a 17th-century Indigenous woman—yet her life has long been shrouded by misunderstandings and misinformation. The conference “Pocahontas and After,” organized by the University of London and the British Library, sought a deeper understanding of Pocahontas’s life and the lasting impact of the clash of empires that took place in the heart of the Powhatan Confederacy during the 17th-century.

The story of the Tuscarora Company, which played a major role in defending its post against an attack led by top generals of the Confederacy in the American Civil War.

Treaties matter, not only to American Indians, but to everyone who lives in the United States.

Why did treaty-making with Indian nations fall into disfavor? The answer lies in understanding the transformation of American thought about Indian nations after the Civil War.

An exhibition tells the remarkable story of soldiers from more than a dozen tribes who used their Native languages in service to the US. military in WWI and WWII.