Native American Heritage Month
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50 free Native American Heritage Month trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Native American Heritage Month is a yearly invitation to learn about the first peoples of the United States: hundreds of distinct nations with their own languages, histories and living traditions. It is also a good moment to notice how much of everyday American life, from place names to foods to team games, began in Native communities. This quiz covers how the heritage month came about and the people it celebrates: leaders who resisted removal, wartime code talkers, Olympic champions, a celebrated dancer, an astronaut, poets and novelists. It also asks about homes, crafts, foods and gatherings, and about the events every student of American history should know. It is written for classrooms, library and workplace heritage events, and anyone who wants a friendly test of what they know. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few new stories to tell.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which month did a 1990 joint resolution of Congress set aside as National American Indian Heritage Month?
November
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.
Q 02Which Shoshone woman, a guide to Lewis and Clark, appears on the golden dollar coin introduced in 2000?
Sacagawea
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.
Q 03Which Sac and Fox athlete won both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics?
Jim Thorpe
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.
Q 04Corn, beans and squash, planted together in mounds by many Native farmers, are known by what name?
The Three Sisters
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.
Q 05Which team sport, known to its Native inventors as the Creator's Game, is North America's oldest organized sport?
Lacrosse
Lacrosse games once ran from sunup to sundown for two or three days. They served as ceremony and as a kind of symbolic warfare.
Q 06Navajo Code Talkers sent battlefield radio messages in a code that was never broken for which US military branch?
Marine Corps
Marine Corps code talkers had no Navajo word for submarine, so their code called it an iron fish. A bomber became a buzzard.
Q 07Native American Heritage Day, signed into law in 2009, is observed on the day after which US holiday?
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving always falls on a Thursday, so the heritage day lands on the Friday that shoppers know as Black Friday.
Q 08Indigenous Peoples' Day, on the second Monday of October, began as a counter-celebration to which federal holiday?
Columbus Day
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.
Q 09Which animal's English name comes from a Powhatan word that Captain John Smith recorded in colonial Virginia?
Raccoon
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.
Q 10Which 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
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.
Q 11Maria Tallchief, a member of the Osage Nation, became America's first major star of which performing art?
Ballet
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.
Q 12Which Cherokee silversmith completed a syllabary in 1821 that let his people read and write their own language?
Sequoyah
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.
Q 13Who became the first woman elected Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation and later appeared on a US quarter?
Wilma Mankiller
Q 21Which Hunkpapa Lakota leader toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in 1885 and charged for his autograph?
Sitting Bull
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.
Q 22Which Apache war leader, who surrendered at Skeleton Canyon in 1886, later lent his name to a paratroopers' shout?
Geronimo
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.
Q 23Which Shawnee chief built a confederacy of tribes to resist US expansion and was killed at the Battle of the Thames?
Tecumseh
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.
Q 14John Herrington, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, became the first enrolled Native American to do what in 2002?
Fly in space
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.
Q 15Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo became the first Native American Cabinet secretary in 2021, leading which department?
Interior
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.
Q 16Ira Hayes, a Pima serviceman, was one of six men photographed raising the US flag on which Pacific island?
Iwo Jima
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.
Q 17Billy Mills, an Oglala Lakota runner raised on the Pine Ridge reservation, won a shock 1964 Olympic gold in which event?
10,000 metres
The 10,000 metres in Tokyo is counted among the greatest Olympic upsets, because Mills was a virtual unknown going into the race.
Q 18Charles Curtis, an enrolled citizen of the Kaw Nation, reached which national office in 1929?
Vice president
Vice president under Herbert Hoover, Curtis remains the only Native American to have held the office. He had earlier been Senate majority leader.
Q 19Which Cherokee Nation citizen became a film star and humorist famous for rope tricks and a nationally syndicated column?
Will Rogers
Will Rogers made 71 films and wrote more than 4,000 syndicated columns. He is still known as Oklahoma's Favorite Son.
Q 20Which president approved the 1990 resolution that created National American Indian Heritage Month?
George H. W. Bush
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.
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.
Q 24Which Nez Perce leader surrendered at Bear Paw in 1877 after his people's long flight toward asylum in Canada?
Chief Joseph
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.
Q 25Which Oglala Lakota war leader is being carved into a Black Hills mountain in a memorial begun in 1948?
Crazy Horse
Crazy Horse will be shown on horseback, pointing to his tribal land. The sculpture was commissioned by a Lakota elder, Henry Standing Bear.
Q 26Pocahontas, a daughter of the Powhatan paramount chief, married which English tobacco planter in 1614?
John Rolfe
John Rolfe married her after she had been baptised under the name Rebecca. Their son Thomas was born the following January.
Q 27Which Patuxet man, who learned English as a captive in Europe, taught the Plymouth Pilgrims to grow native crops?
Squanto
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.
Q 28Susan La Flesche Picotte, raised on the Omaha Reservation, was the first Native American woman to earn what?
A medical degree
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.
Q 29Ely S. Parker, a Seneca officer on Grant's staff, wrote out the Confederate surrender terms at which Virginia site?
Appomattox
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.
Q 30Lily Gladstone became the first Native American nominated for the Best Actress Oscar in a 2023 film by which director?
Martin Scorsese
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.