Name: Introduction to Native American History: Ep 1 of Crash Course Native American History
Uploaded: 2025-05-09T05:22:59.000Z
Duration: 12 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Here's the year the stars fell, the year of mini buffalo, the year of whooping cough, the year of measles, the year of an eclipse, the year the white soldiers attacked, a year of peace, a year of war. This is a winter count. It's a record of 71 years of

Yanktonite history. Each picture represents a notable event between first snowfalls.

Adverbs of degree

But this is just a snippet of a much larger timeline. Every tribe has one, a history that's deep, ongoing, and totally unique. And yet, they're all unified by one thing.

Hi, I'm Che Jim, and welcome to Crash Course Native American History.

First things first, there's no way we can tell the entire history of indigenous people in what's now the United States. But that doesn't mean we can't bridge some gaps and add a little complexity to common understandings. Maybe we'll even go crazy and fix some misunderstandings.

Studies have shown that across the board in US schools, students aren't getting much of an education when it comes to Native American history, not by a long shot. As one Navajo

Hopi student wrote in 2019, of the US history books used in my classroom, there are 307 pages, and only 10 pages talk about Natives. So yeah, this will be hard. And we won't cover everything, but we'll cover a lot of things. We hope to answer some big questions, leave you curious about others, and really blow your hair back with facts about how Native history has shaped our world today. So let's start with a word on words. There are over 500 Native tribes, also called nations, within the US alone. Some are recognized by the federal government, and some aren't. I'm a member of the Navajo Nation. Not to brag.

But even that simple statement has layers of nuance. We call ourselves Diné, which means the people. Navajo is the name that came about thanks to Europeans. Some Diné folks use the term Navajo. Others prefer not to. It's a to-each-their-own situation. Throughout this series, I'll use specific Native nations' names. So if I'm talking about the Kickapoo, or the

Hulapai, or the Chickahominy, you'll hear me say so with perfect pronunciation to boot.

Okay, I'll try my best. And I'll use the word Native, like, a lot. I might say Native folks, or Native people, but I'll also say Indigenous. That's the broadest term for people worldwide who's been living in a particular place since before settlers arrived. Like, for example, in the US, the Aleut, the Chumash, and the Kanaka Maoli? All Indigenous. But the Sámi in places like Norway, the Maya in places like Mexico and Guatemala, and the Ainu in Japan are also all Indigenous. And that way, we're kind of like cousins. Not by blood, more by vibes.

You'll also hear me say American Indian, a label that some Indigenous people embrace and others reject. Pro. It's been around for a long time. It's used in US laws, treaties, even the names of federal agencies like the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Indian is also just a term older Native people like to use, especially around other Native people.

Con? This is not India, buddy. Another con? Even though any Native could self-identify as an American Indian, it doesn't officially include all Indigenous people. That's because the government only applies their term to members of federally recognized Native nations in the contiguous 48 states, but not Alaskan Natives or Native Hawaiians.

We'll talk a lot more about what it means to have federal recognition as well as the status of Natives in Alaska and Hawaii later in this series.

For now, let's end this vocabulary lesson with Native American.

This term came about in the 1960s as an alternative to American Indian.

It's gained a lot of ground as a go-to option. But Native American has its own issues.

Like the Americas are all this business. Maybe even this. Possibly this too?

But now we're getting wild. Of course, this term isn't preferred everywhere.

In Canada, many Indigenous people prefer to be called First Nations or First Peoples, one of the three categories alongside Inuit and Métis.

In Spanish-speaking Latin America, many prefer Indígenas.

So Native American isn't perfect, but it broadly describes Indigenous people within the U.S.

At the end of the day, how Natives choose to identify is very personal.

I call myself Indigenous. I also call myself handsome and brave every morning in front of the mirror.

Every Indigenous person has their own preferences when it comes to identity.

Though, for the record, you're all brave and handsome.

The point is, there are no definitive rules on Indigenous terminology.

There couldn't be. Like, remember how I said there are hundreds of

Native nations inside the U.S. alone? Well, even that's complicated.

About 40 Native nations today have territory split in half by the U.S. border.

Like the Ganiye-Gahaga or Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne to the north, or the Tohono O'odham Nation to the south.

And many, many, many Native nations like the Ho-Chunk were forced away from their ancestral homelands and live in a totally different region today.

But with just 24 episodes, we needed to narrow down so we have room to go deep.

So that's why we'll be focusing mainly on the history of Native peoples in the United States, and that's why we're calling this series Native American History.

I fought for the name, A Brave and Handsome History of Native America, but that was not successful.

Which brings me to the paradox at the heart of Native American history.

On the one hand, there are tons of Native nations with their own unique histories, their own timelines. There is no single history that we can call Native American history.

On the other hand, Native nations share some common experiences.

Though they've happened in different ways, times, and places, those common experiences are a result of settler colonialism, a force that binds Native histories together.

Remember back in the intro when I said that there's one thing that unites our histories?

This is that thing! Let me break it down.

That's where one nation exerts control over another nation and its resources without becoming part of that nation themselves.

For example, colonialism describes what happened when the British took over Nigeria in the 19th century, ruling indirectly through local leaders and getting rich off palm oil.

Nigerians still lived there, but their lives were never the same.

The settler part takes this a step beyond.

The goal of settler colonialism is to remove and erase the people already living in a place so that a new group can move in instead.

And this isn't just describing a single historical event or person.

Settler colonialism describes a system, and the history of the whole United States was shaped by this system.

It's the underlying logic behind centuries of wars, treaties, policies, and laws that affect Native people's lives to this day.

That system is part of the reason why basically any question that seems to be simple is going to be complicated.

Well, before settlers arrived in North America, nobody here called themselves Indian or a Native American.

But in the 19th century, the federal government created a new single Native identity, lumping all Native people together as a single race.

Suddenly, in the words of High School Musical's Troy Bolton, we were all in this together.

The government created records of tribal members and assigned each person a blood quantum, or perceived fraction of Indian blood.

The idea was that over time, children born to Native families would have lower and lower blood quantums.

Thinking of Indian blood as something that could be diluted down to zero over generations served the goal of eliminating Native people.

And second, to eventually relieve the federal government of its treaty and trust obligations to Natives.

As of the 2020 US Census, about 9.7 million people, or 2.9% of the population, self-identified as American Indian or Alaskan Native.

Though this, too, is, wait for it, complicated.

It's not clear how many of those people were enrolled tribal members, members of tribes the federal government doesn't recognize, or even just people who've heard family stories about their great-great-grandma being a Cherokee princess.

Anyway, we'll talk much more about Native identity in Episode 4.

For now, let's talk about what we mean by the history part of Native American history.

The past five centuries have had an enormous impact on Native nations.

But also, the past five centuries are just a blip.

We often use the phrase, since time immemorial, or the beginning of time itself, to describe Natives' deep and ongoing presence on this continent.

We're the descendants of the first inhabitants.

We've been here continuously for thousands of years.

Don't make me math the math on how many generations that is.

But when Native American history does get told, it's usually in a way that begins in 1492 and ends in the late 1800s.

Which might give you the impression that history didn't really begin until Europeans showed up.

Or that what happened before is unknowable.

Or that Native Americans were mere extras in an A-list drama of the United States.

And we mysteriously vanished by the 20th century, only a brief blurb on the nation's IMDb page.

The past before European contact is not unknowable.

Native peoples' oral traditions hold knowledge of the past.

Like, for generations, the Klamath people have passed down a story about a long-ago volcano that erupted and filled with water, becoming what's now Crater Lake.

That was about 1,500 years before anyone even started building Stonehenge.

Our ancestors were very skilled at gossip.

Which is why we'll include stuff that happened before 1492.

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Introduction to Native American History: Ep 1 of Crash Course Native American History

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