50 Fun Facts About Native American Heritage Month

Which month did a 1990 joint resolution of Congress set aside as National American Indian Heritage Month?

November had first hosted an American Indian Week in 1986, four years before Congress stretched the observance to a whole month. It is now usually called National Native American Heritage Month.

Which Shoshone woman, a guide to Lewis and Clark, appears on the golden dollar coin introduced in 2000?

Sacagawea is shown carrying her infant son Jean Baptiste on her back. The baby on the coin was partly modelled on a real one-year-old.

Which Sac and Fox athlete won both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics?

Jim Thorpe lost both titles a year later for having played semi-professional baseball. He was not restored as sole champion of the two events until 2022.

Corn, beans and squash, planted together in mounds by many Native farmers, are known by what name?

The Three Sisters help one another grow: cornstalks act as a trellis for the beans, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil, and broad squash leaves shade out weeds.

Which team sport, known to its Native inventors as the Creator's Game, is North America's oldest organized sport?

Lacrosse games once ran from sunup to sundown for two or three days. They served as ceremony and as a kind of symbolic warfare.

Navajo Code Talkers sent battlefield radio messages in a code that was never broken for which US military branch?

Marine Corps code talkers had no Navajo word for submarine, so their code called it an iron fish. A bomber became a buzzard.

Native American Heritage Day, signed into law in 2009, is observed on the day after which US holiday?

Thanksgiving always falls on a Thursday, so the heritage day lands on the Friday that shoppers know as Black Friday.

Indigenous Peoples' Day, on the second Monday of October, began as a counter-celebration to which federal holiday?

Columbus Day gave way in Berkeley, California, in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the explorer's first voyage. Other cities and states followed in the years after.

Which animal's English name comes from a Powhatan word that Captain John Smith recorded in colonial Virginia?

Raccoon comes from a Powhatan term meaning roughly 'animal that scratches with its hands'. The spelling settled only later: early colonists wrote the word down in several different ways.

Which 1974 hit by Redbone, the first Native American band in the US top five, features in Guardians of the Galaxy?

Come and Get Your Love peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100. Forty years later it found a new audience on the mixtape carried by the film's hero, Peter Quill.

Maria Tallchief, a member of the Osage Nation, became America's first major star of which performing art?

Ballet made her famous when her lead in The Firebird caused a sensation. She became the first Native American to hold the rank of prima ballerina.

Which Cherokee silversmith completed a syllabary in 1821 that let his people read and write their own language?

Sequoyah's system spread so quickly that the Cherokee Nation officially adopted it in 1825, by which time most Cherokees could read and write it.

Who became the first woman elected Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation and later appeared on a US quarter?

Wilma Mankiller led the Cherokee Nation from 1985 to 1995. Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom three years after she stepped down.

John Herrington, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, became the first enrolled Native American to do what in 2002?

He became the first enrolled tribal citizen to fly in space, and he carried the Chickasaw Nation's flag with him on the thirteen-day trip.

Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo became the first Native American Cabinet secretary in 2021, leading which department?

Interior put her in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where she set up a unit to pursue cases of missing and murdered Native Americans.

Ira Hayes, a Pima serviceman, was one of six men photographed raising the US flag on which Pacific island?

Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi is where Joe Rosenthal took the picture in February 1945. Hayes later played himself raising the flag in a John Wayne film about the battle.

Billy Mills, an Oglala Lakota runner raised on the Pine Ridge reservation, won a shock 1964 Olympic gold in which event?

The 10,000 metres in Tokyo is counted among the greatest Olympic upsets, because Mills was a virtual unknown going into the race.

Charles Curtis, an enrolled citizen of the Kaw Nation, reached which national office in 1929?

Vice president under Herbert Hoover, Curtis remains the only Native American to have held the office. He had earlier been Senate majority leader.

Which Cherokee Nation citizen became a film star and humorist famous for rope tricks and a nationally syndicated column?

Will Rogers made 71 films and wrote more than 4,000 syndicated columns. He is still known as Oklahoma's Favorite Son.

Which president approved the 1990 resolution that created National American Indian Heritage Month?

George H. W. Bush approved it on August 3, 1990. A year later Congress asked presidents to proclaim the heritage month every year from then on.

Which Hunkpapa Lakota leader toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in 1885 and charged for his autograph?

Sitting Bull earned a small fortune from autographs and pictures on the tour, but he often gave the money away to the homeless and beggars.

Which Apache war leader, who surrendered at Skeleton Canyon in 1886, later lent his name to a paratroopers' shout?

Geronimo was a medicine man rather than a chief. Army paratroopers began shouting his name to show they had no fear of jumping out of an airplane.

Which Shawnee chief built a confederacy of tribes to resist US expansion and was killed at the Battle of the Thames?

Tecumseh's name is often translated as Shooting Star. The Great Comet of 1811 was read as an omen that his confederacy should be supported.

Which Nez Perce leader surrendered at Bear Paw in 1877 after his people's long flight toward asylum in Canada?

Chief Joseph was born in Oregon's Wallowa Valley, the homeland his band had been ordered to leave. His Nez Perce name means Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain.

Which Oglala Lakota war leader is being carved into a Black Hills mountain in a memorial begun in 1948?

Crazy Horse will be shown on horseback, pointing to his tribal land. The sculpture was commissioned by a Lakota elder, Henry Standing Bear.

Pocahontas, a daughter of the Powhatan paramount chief, married which English tobacco planter in 1614?

John Rolfe married her after she had been baptised under the name Rebecca. Their son Thomas was born the following January.

Which Patuxet man, who learned English as a captive in Europe, taught the Plymouth Pilgrims to grow native crops?

Squanto, also called Tisquantum, came home in 1619 to find his people wiped out by an epidemic. The Pilgrims built Plymouth on the site of his old village.

Susan La Flesche Picotte, raised on the Omaha Reservation, was the first Native American woman to earn what?

A medical degree let her come home as a doctor to her own people. In 1913 she founded the first privately funded hospital on a Native American reservation.

Ely S. Parker, a Seneca officer on Grant's staff, wrote out the Confederate surrender terms at which Virginia site?

Appomattox was not the end of his career: four years later President Grant made him Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the first Native American to hold the post.

Lily Gladstone became the first Native American nominated for the Best Actress Oscar in a 2023 film by which director?

Martin Scorsese cast her in Killers of the Flower Moon as Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman who survived a string of murders. The role also won her a Golden Globe.

What is the traditional dwelling of the Navajo people, built with its door facing east to welcome the rising sun?

Hogan shapes changed in the 1900s, when wooden railroad cross-ties made six- and eight-sided walls easier to build. Older ones are round or cone-shaped.

The Haudenosaunee, whose own name means people of the longhouse, were known to French colonists by which name?

Iroquois is an outsiders' name of obscure and debated origin, first written down in 1603. The confederacy grew from five nations to six when the Tuscarora joined.

Totem poles, usually carved from western red cedar to record family lineage, come from which region of North America?

Pacific Northwest nations such as the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian carve them, in a range that runs from Washington through British Columbia to southeast Alaska.

Wampum, the white and purple beads woven into belts to record treaties, was traditionally made from what material?

Seashells supplied both colours: the purple and white came from the quahog, a hard-shelled Atlantic clam, and more white beads from the channeled whelk.

What name is given to the Native American gathering that opens with a Grand Entry of dancers and features drum groups?

Powwow comes from a New England Algonquian word, probably Narragansett, for a spiritual leader. A session begins with the Grand Entry and a prayer, followed by a flag song.

Which bread, developed from government rations of flour, sugar and lard, is the base of an Indian taco?

Frybread became a symbol of resilience because it was created out of necessity. Some Native chefs reject it for the same reason, as a legacy of colonialism.

The dreamcatcher, a willow hoop woven with a web to protect sleeping infants, originated among which people?

Ojibwe legend credits the charm to Spider Woman, who watched over the children. When the nation spread too far for her to reach them all, mothers and grandmothers wove the webs.

Kachina dolls, carved from cottonwood root to teach girls about spirit beings, belong to which Southwestern people?

Hopi girls receive simple flat figures as infants and the full-bodied kind at ceremonies from about the age of two. Traditionally the body is carved from a single piece of cottonwood root.

Which narrow skin-covered hunting boat was developed by the Inuit, Yupik and Aleut peoples of the Arctic?

The kayak is believed to be at least 4,000 years old. Western Alaskan builders framed theirs in wood, while eastern Inuit used whalebone on their treeless coasts.

Which high-energy travel food, named from a Cree word for fat, mixes dried meat with tallow and sometimes berries?

Pemmican was adopted by European fur traders and later carried by polar explorers, Ernest Shackleton among them.

What name is given to the forced removal of the Cherokee and other nations to Indian Territory in the 1830s?

Trail of Tears removals uprooted about 60,000 people from five nations. The Cherokee were forced out in 1838, after gold was discovered on their land in Georgia.

In which 1876 battle in Montana did Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors defeat George Custer's 7th Cavalry?

Little Bighorn is often called Custer's Last Stand. The Lakota and other Plains nations know the fight as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

Which San Francisco Bay island did Native American activists occupy for 19 months from 1969 as surplus federal land?

Alcatraz had stood empty since its prison closed in 1963. The occupiers argued that an 1868 treaty entitled Native peoples to federal land no longer in use.

The National Museum of the American Indian, which opened on the National Mall in 2004, belongs to which institution?

The Smithsonian opened it in front of thousands of American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians, then the largest Indigenous gathering Washington had seen.

Which mound city, across the Mississippi from modern St. Louis, was once the largest urban centre north of Mexico?

Cahokia held between 15,000 and 20,000 people at its peak around 1100 AD, along with about 120 earthworks of many shapes and sizes.

Which president signed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, making Native Americans born in the United States citizens?

Calvin Coolidge signed it on June 2, 1924. Voting was another matter: it was governed by state law, and some Native Americans waited until 1948 for the ballot.

Which state's governor is credited with the first formal American Indian Day, set for the second Saturday in May 1916?

New York acted months after Red Fox James, who had ridden from state to state on horseback, handed the endorsements of 24 governors to the White House.

Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca museum director, persuaded which youth group to set aside a day for the First Americans?

The Boy Scouts of America kept the day from 1912 to 1915. Parker also helped found the Society of American Indians, which pressed for Native citizenship.

Which Kiowa author won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel House Made of Dawn?

N. Scott Momaday's win carried Native American literature into the mainstream. The novel is counted as the first major work of the Native American Renaissance.

Which Muscogee Nation poet and saxophonist became the first Native American to serve as United States Poet Laureate?

Joy Harjo held the post from 2019 to 2022, and she was only the second laureate ever to serve three terms.