How to Teach About Indigenous America
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It’s important for American history students to learn about the First Nations that lived in the Western Hemisphere for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans. Here are some ideas you can use to help your students. This content can be adapted for middle school and high school.
Activity One: How Did Indigenous Peoples Arrive in the Western Hemisphere?
Put a world map on the whiteboard. Have students identify the United States, Canada, Russia, and other places around the world. Ask students to imagine what it was like to live in those places tens of thousands of years before (mention that the last ice age was just over 11,000 years ago).
Tell the students they need to find a way people could get from Asia or Europe to the Western Hemisphere. Put students in groups of two and ask them to write down their answers. You could also provide students with a blank world map, and they could map out their strategy.
Activity Two: Different Indigenous Cultures
It’s important for students to understand that the Indigenous Peoples included many different cultures that were influenced by the part of the Western Hemisphere they lived. For example, Indigenous tribes along the Pacific coast ate fish and didn’t need to roam while tribes in the Plains were constantly moving and chasing bison.
To teach about the different cultures, use a simple PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation. Instead of just lecturing to your students, use each slide as a conversation starter. While going through the content, students should either be taking notes or completing a guide sheet with questions to answer.
Check out this engaging PowerPoint on the Indigenous Peoples of America: First Nations & the Spaniards.
Activity Three: Arrival of the Spanish
After properly teaching students about the Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere, end the unit talking about the arrival of the Spanish.
Have students imagine what it would have been like as an indigenous tribal member seeing the arrival of the Spanish upon their shores.
Spend some time introducing the Aztecs which was the dominant indigenous tribe in Mexico when the Spanish arrived. Explain how the Spanish ended the Aztec Empire which started a century of Spanish exploration and dominance in parts of the Western Hemisphere.
Then give your students a primary source activity. Every class — or almost every class — should include a primary source to be read in class or for homework.
Check out this interesting primary source — with accompanying activities — detailing Aztec accounts of the Spanish invasion of the Aztec Empire: Primary Source.
Extra Help
If you need a little extra help before teaching your students about the Indigenous Peoples and the arrival of the Spanish or you would like to assign a video to your students, here is a detailed video to help you:
