Understanding and Teaching Native American History is a timely and urgently needed remedy to a long-standing gap in history instruction. While the past three decades have seen burgeoning scholarship in Indigenous studies, comparatively little of that has trickled into classrooms. This volume is designed to help teachers effectively integrate Indigenous history and culture into their lessons, providing richly researched content and resources across the chronological and geographical landscape of what is now known as North America.

Despite the availability of new scholarship, many teachers struggle with contextualizing Indigenous history and experience. Native peoples frequently find themselves relegated to historical descriptions, merely a foil to the European settlers who are the protagonists in the dominant North American narrative. This book offers a way forward, an alternative framing of the story that highlights the ongoing integral role of Native peoples via broad coverage in a variety of topics including the historical, political, and cultural.

With its scope and clarity of vision, suggestions for navigating sensitive topics, and a multitude of innovative approaches authored by contributors from multidisciplinary backgrounds, Understanding and Teaching Native American History will also find use in methods and other graduate courses. Nearly a decade in the conception and making, this is a groundbreaking source for both beginning and veteran instructors.
About the Author: Kristofer Ray is an Honorary Fellow at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull. His areas of expertise include early modern American Indian experience broadly, Native-European interaction in trans-Appalachia specifically, and the European construction of Indigenous slave law. In addition to several book chapters, edited volumes, and journal articles, he is the author of Middle Tennessee, 1775-1825 and the forthcoming Cherokees, Europeans, and Empire in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1670-1774. Brady DeSanti (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe) is the director of Native American studies and an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His research focuses on Native American history and religious traditions.