Understand U.S.-Indigenous relations the way they actually happened

If you've ever sat in a U.S. history class and felt that something was missing — that the story moved too quickly from "early contact" to "westward expansion" without really reckoning with what happened in between, or why — you're not wrong. The standard survey has gaps that aren't accidental. They reflect choices about whose knowledge counts, whose losses register, and whose governments get to be treated as real.

This course exists to fill those gaps with evidence. Not with guilt, not with a simplified counter-narrative, but with the actual documents: the treaty texts, the court opinions, the legislative records, the firsthand accounts from Indigenous people who lived through removal, allotment, boarding schools, termination, and the long fight for self-determination. I designed this course because I believe students — whether they are seventeen or fifty-seven — are capable of handling complex, well-sourced history. The question has never been whether this material is too difficult. It's whether we're willing to look at it honestly.

What you will find here is precision. We do not talk about "Native Americans" as a single culture, because there is no single culture — there are hundreds of distinct nations, each with its own government, geography, diplomatic history, and experience of U.S. policy. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Diné Nation and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation are not interchangeable. Their treaties are different. Their legal situations are different. Their histories with the federal government are different. Learning to make those distinctions is one of the most important things this course will give you.

We move through the full arc: Indigenous governance before European arrival, the diplomatic and military complexity of the colonial period, the Founding era's legal frameworks for dealing with Native nations, the treaty system and how it was systematically manipulated, removal, the reservation era, the Dawes Act and its catastrophic land theft, the boarding school system and its documented abuses, the mid-twentieth-century termination policy, the Native rights movement, and the realities of Indigenous life and governance today. None of these chapters is a footnote. Each connects to the next, and each connects to the present.

I want to be straightforward about what I'm asking of you. This is not a passive course. You will read primary sources and be expected to analyze them. You will complete a capstone research report on one specific Native nation. You will encounter documented history that is difficult — not because it is sensationalized, but because it is true. What I can promise is that the rigor is consistent, the sourcing is transparent, and the goal throughout is understanding, not ideology. Come ready to read carefully and think precisely. That's the work, and it's worth doing.