Background

America's First Nations are its first roots and an important part of its foundation and future. Yet existing social studies and American history textbooks provide limited coverage, from the millennia preceding European invasions to their post-Columbian histories and their present situations.

In most United States history books, Indians are consigned to the margins of the main story and appear only as opponents of national expansion.

Colin Calloway, Historian

This discovery should not have come as a surprise to me. But though I had been writing American history for nearly fifty years, it was.

Roger Kennedy, Director Emeritus

National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

The White Man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America... The Roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and soil.

Luther Standing Bear (Lakota)

America’s First Nations: American Indians in Social Studies Curricula was a summer institute to aid K-12 teachers in correcting the lack knowledge about our country's first nations, to familiarize them with a variety of instructional resources, and to provide curricula units in supplementing current social studies and history books. From June 26 through July 21, 2000, a select and diverse group of twenty-five teacher-scholars met to learn about North America’s 15,000 years of archaeologically recorded human occupation and 500 years of oral and text documentation. Their results are the classroom-tested curricula presented here. For more information, please contact Co-director Mark Thiel.