20 Interesting Historical Facts About Native Americans That We Never Got To Learn About In School
1.The sequoia tree is named after the Cherokee leader Sequoyah, who helped create an alphabet for his people to use.
2.Many words, such as "chipmunk," "pecan," and "skunk," come from an Algonquian language.
When the English explorers arrived in North America, they largely interacted with Native people who spoke an Algonquian language, and as a result, several of their words were adopted into English vocabulary. Other English words with Native American origins include "chocolate," "potato," and "poncho."
3.More than half of US states have names based on Native languages, like Connecticut, Utah, and Kentucky.
4.Indigenous communities have lived in North America since about 12,000 BCE.
The Native American groups in North America didn't live as one established country. They existed as many smaller nations and communities that had different traditions and languages.
5.The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted US citizenship to all of the country's Indigenous people.
The act was passed, in part, to recognize the more than 8,000 Native Americans who fought in World War I.
6.The Native people were resourceful and created tools from different parts of nature.
For example, some Indigenous people used porcupine hair to make hairbrushes, or sticks to make toothbrushes.
7.The bald eagle on the US national emblem is actually the Iroquois bald eagle.
When Ben Franklin learned about the Iroquois Confederacy, a council of tribe leaders who were elected to make decisions for the group, he wanted to replicate it as a governmental system for the United States. After the US was established, Franklin replaced the original imperial eagle with the bald eagle on the US seal to represent the Iroquois Confederacy.
8.The Iroquois went trick-or-treating before anyone else ever did.
During an annual winter festival, Iroquois children would be led around the village by an older woman to collect gifts from different families' homes.
9.Lacrosse was a sport first played by Native Americans in the Southeast, especially by the Choctaw. French explorers took the sport back to Europe, where it was actually given the name "lacrosse."
Native people also invented games like tug-of-war, relay races, and showshoeing.
10.Christian missionaries mistakenly believed totem poles were symbols of Native gods. Instead, the totem poles signified family status, and they often depicted animals important to the families who put them up. Sometimes they were built as memorials to ancestors.
11.Native Americans experience higher rates of suicide than any other groups in the US. The suicide rate for Native youths is 2.5 times higher than the overall national average.
Native Americans are also twice as likely to die by the age of 24 as any other ethnic group in the US.
12.Many Native women were warriors and fought alongside men in battles like the Battle of Little Bighorn and the Battle of the Rosebud.
13.Different tribes used different types of housing. For example, many Plains tribes lived in teepees, many Iroquois tribes lived in longhouses, and many Taos tribes lived in pueblos.
14.The marriage between Pocahontas and John Rolfe was the first recorded interracial marriage in US history.
Pocahontas was kidnapped and converted during the first Anglo-Powhatan war. While imprisoned, she was introduced to Rolfe, whom she agreed to marry. The marriage eased tensions between the Powhatan tribe and the British for some time.
15.Per capita, a larger percentage of Native Americans serve in the US military than any other race or ethnic group.
16.The Native American code talkers of World War II were able to relay important messages in an unbreakable code using Native languages and dialects, giving the US a huge advantage.
17.Native Americans developed a process to create a red dye out of dried cactus-eating insects. The dye, called cochineal, became a major export out of North America. In fact, the British used it to dye their uniforms red for the Revolutionary War.
18.Native Americans were the first to develop and use anesthetics. Before learning about this anesthesia, European doctors performed surgery without any numbing drugs or treatments.
19.More than 20,000 Native Americans were essentially enslaved by California missions and missionaries like Junípero Serra.
20.And finally, the Powhatan tribe played a major role in keeping the first British residents in North America alive in Jamestown, Virginia.
Chief Powhatan provided settlers with food and care while they were suffering from starvation and a variety of diseases. Unfortunately, the English continued to encroach on Powhatan land despite the generous help the tribe offered the settlers when they first arrived.
