Topic 1 · The First Americans
Study guide notes, academic vocabulary, and review questions with answers. Textbook pages 27–30.
What happened when Native peoples were forced off the land their ways of life were built on, and why does that land still matter to Native nations today?
That is the one question this lesson answers, and it closes the Topic: every lesson before it showed people building a life out of what the land around them gave them, and this one follows that land into the present.
The lesson video is posted in Google Classroom. This page is the written material that goes with it, in the same order as your workbook: notes first, then vocabulary, then the review questions. Answers are hidden until you click Show answer. Try each one in your workbook before you click.
Throughout the history of the United States, white settlers and the U.S. Army forced Native Americans off their homelands and onto reservations. A reservation is an area of land set aside by the U.S. government for the use of a particular group or nation of Native Americans — land assigned to a people, not land they chose and shaped over centuries. That is why displacement did more than move people: when a nation’s food, housing, tools, and traditions were built out of one particular place, being put somewhere else takes the ground out from under all of it. The Standing Rock reservation is more than 2 million acres across North and South Dakota, designated for the Standing Rock Sioux.
In 2014 an oil company announced a plan to build an underground oil pipeline from North Dakota to Illinois. The Standing Rock Sioux took the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline to court, and in the document your book quotes the Tribe argues that its ancestors — the Oceti Sakowin, the Great Sioux Nation — used and occupied the northern Great Plains since time immemorial, including much of the land the pipeline would cross. The Tribe’s case is that its cultural sites are connected across the whole of its traditional territory, inside and outside the reservation boundary, so damage to any one site damages the Tribe’s culture, history, and religion together. That argument was filed in a federal lawsuit in 2016, which is what makes sovereignty and stewardship the two words this lesson turns on.
This is not a past-tense subject. Every lesson before this one is written in the past — Beringia, the mound cities, the pueblos, 1492. This one is not. The Standing Rock Sioux are a nation now, and the lawsuit your book quotes was filed in 2016. Your own textbook asks it on the page before: who are their descendants, and where and how do they live? If you finish Topic 1 thinking Native peoples are something that happened, you have the one thing wrong that this last lesson exists to fix.
Tap any word for a picture and the full definition. The bold part is the definition to write in your box.
Watch these two: sovereignty is authority — the right of a nation to govern itself and to decide. Stewardship is responsibility — a duty to care for land and water. They turn up in the same sentence in this lesson and they are not the same thing: a nation can argue that a project ignores its authority and that it breaks a duty of care, and those are two separate arguments.
Identify each term and explain its significance for the lives of Native Americans before the 1500s. Tap any word for a picture and the full answer. One sentence each, and each one should say what the term is and why it mattered.
Write the answer for each one in your workbook in your own words first. Then tap Show answer to see if you got it right.
Land set aside by the U.S. government for a Native American group or nation.
A highway sign marking the boundary of the Seneca Nation’s Allegany Reservation, New York, 2018
The authority of a nation to govern itself and make its own laws.
The Navajo Nation Council, the Navajo Nation’s own legislature, in session in its chamber
The responsibility to care for and protect something for those who come after you.
Dirk Charley cups a giant sequoia seedling in the Bearskin grove, Sequoia National Forest, 2022
Both lived in the American Southwest: Hohokam about 200–1400 C.E., Ancient Puebloans about 1–1300 C.E. Both adapted to dry conditions. The Hohokam dug hundreds of miles of channels to bring water to their corn and cotton, and the Ancient Puebloans built stone dwellings, including cliff dwellings, in the Four Corners region.
Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde, Colorado — an Ancient Puebloan cliff dwelling
They built earthen pyramids and effigy mounds, and lived in organized urban centres like Cahokia. Socially they farmed crops, traded across the continent, and had specialized craftsmen. Cahokia, in present-day Illinois, is the largest known earthworks complex — 20,000 or more people may have lived there, and Monks Mound rose nearly 100 feet with a temple at its summit.
Monks Mound at Cahokia, Illinois — the largest earthwork north of Mexico
The land along the route holds burial and sacred sites central to the Tribe. The Standing Rock Sioux argue those sites are central to their culture, history and religion. Their case is that those sites are connected across the whole of their traditional territory, inside and outside the reservation boundary, so damage to any one site is damage to the whole people. Native nations make that same argument about the land and the water their communities depend on. The excerpt is from paragraphs 38, 40 and 41 of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, filed July 27, 2016.
The Dakota Access Pipeline under construction near New Salem, North Dakota, August 2016
Moving from place to place instead of settling. The earliest peoples were nomadic hunters and gatherers who had to stay with the herds and wild plants they lived on, and that is what carried them across a continent.
Bison on the plains — the kind of herd nomadic hunters moved with
The movement of people into a new area to stay. More than 13,000 years ago it is how people first travelled from Siberia into Alaska, and eventually populated the whole of North and South America.
The routes map from your textbook, printed page 8
The land bridge between Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age. It appeared when ocean levels lowered, and it mattered because it was one of the two routes — by land or by boat — that brought the first people into the Americas.
Beringia mapped from the depth of the sea floor today
Maize, beans and squash, the three crops early farming peoples grew. They mattered because learning to farm is what let nomadic groups settle in one place permanently and build advanced cultures.
Maize, beans and squash sharing one field — Mixtepec, Mexico, 2007
Growing crops for food instead of only hunting and gathering. A steady food surplus let people settle down, and it freed up time for pottery, for building, and for complex societies.
A maize field in Mexico today
A building material of sun-dried clay and straw. It is what Southwest peoples built their multistory homes out of, when clay was what the desert around them had to give.
The Hopi village of Oraibi, Arizona, photographed in 1898
A long period of extreme cold that ended about 10,000 years ago. The glaciers it built locked up so much of Earth’s water that ocean levels lowered, and Beringia emerged.
North American ice sheets at their greatest extent
A large earthen structure built to hold the dead. The Adena, the Hopewell and the Mississippian peoples raised them, and it mattered because building one takes organized labour — evidence of settled, complex societies north of Mexico. Not every mound held a burial: the one in this picture raised a temple above the ground instead.
Monks Mound at Cahokia, Illinois — a platform mound, not a burial mound. The staircase is modern
Six lessons, and one idea underneath all of them. People built their lives out of what was around them — clay in the desert, bark in the forest, the sea in the Far North. Ocean levels lowered, Beringia emerged, and geography opened the road into the Americas while food decided where people stopped walking. Farming let some peoples settle permanently, and settled peoples built advanced cultures — cities like Cahokia with earthen pyramids at their centre. By 1492 the continent held many different nations, and their housing, their transport, and their food all reflected the particular place each one lived in. That is why the Topic ends where it does: if a way of life is built out of one place, taking that place away takes the way of life with it — and that is what displacement onto a reservation meant. If someone asked you right now why the Standing Rock Sioux went to court over a pipeline route, you should be able to answer in one sentence: because the land was never only land. Say that, and you have Topic 1.
Every photograph on this page is openly licensed and credited by name, as its licence requires. All four are documentary photographs of places and things.
The pipeline photograph is of construction in North Dakota, not of the Standing Rock reservation crossing and not of the protests. No image on this page is offered as evidence for or against any party in the dispute the lesson describes. The migration-routes map is reproduced from Early Americans printed page 8 for classroom use only.