Teaching the Truth About Native North America

National History Day: Telling All Americans' Stories

The National Park Service (NPS) is a federal agency that is charged with protecting and preserving land of ecological and cultural importance to our American heritage. 

In doing so, the NPS must be inclusive of landscapes significant to the entire American nation. As the NPS celebrates its Centennial Anniversary in 2016, it continues to carry out its mission to collect, maintain, and share the stories of our collective American history. Being the only federal agency charged with this important task, it is important that all stories be considered, recorded, and shared. There are many stories embodied within our nation, and, as we go into our second century of stewardship, it is critical that we express the stories from multiple perspectives, through the lenses of all people: the oppressor and the oppressed, the owner and the owned, the colonizer and the colonized.

A government poster advertises "Indian Land for Sale" after the passage of the Dawes Act. Primary sources like this one inform our understanding of history.

Article by Carol McBryant, Mattea Sanders (University of North Carolina), and Carolyn Fiscus (University of Nebraska), 2017

In July 2015, a group of Sigangu youth from the Rosebud Reservation stood at the edge of a battlefield overlooking the Little Bighorn River, ignoring the heat. Their attention was fully focused on their elders, who were telling them a story they had heard many times before. But this time they were standing on sacred ground. As their elders spoke of the Battle of Little Bighorn, the students were able to sense the bloodshed of their ancestors. These young people were standing in the place of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and hundreds of other great warriors of the Lakota and Arapaho and Northern Cheyenne. The significance of this place at that moment was not the defeat of George Armstrong Custer and his Army but rather the understanding that they were able to live today because of a stand taken by their ancestors so many years ago.

The battle was fought along the ridges, steep bluffs, and ravines of the Little Bighorn River from June 25 to 26, 1876. Today, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument is a protected site, entrusted to the National Park Service (NPS). The location of a great conflict, the site also honors a battle of great consequence between the U.S. government and America’s native people.

The NPS is charged with considering, recording, and sharing all of America’s stories.... [Read more...]

This article first appeared in the National History Day 2017 Themebook.

See their website for more information or visit this page to find more NHD articles about National Park Service resources.

McBryant, Carol, Mattea Sanders, and Carolyn Fiscus. "Teaching the Truth About Native America" In National History Day 2017: Taking a Stand in History, edited by Lynne O'Hara, 38-41. 2017.