Native American History
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109 free Native American History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
52 free Native American history trivia questions with answers. Native American history stretches from a Mississippian city bigger than medieval London to a Kaw Nation citizen serving as vice president, with a Cherokee silversmith who invented an alphabet, Navajo Marines whose code was never broken and a Sac and Fox athlete the King of Sweden called the greatest in the world along the way. This quiz spans it all: how many federally recognised tribes there are and which are the largest, Cahokia and Mesa Verde, the Haudenosaunee confederacy, Squanto, Pocahontas and Sacagawea, Tecumseh, the Trail of Tears, Sequoyah's syllabary, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Little Bighorn, Chief Joseph and Geronimo, Wounded Knee, the 1924 Citizenship Act, Jim Thorpe, the code talkers, Wilma Mankiller, Charles Curtis and Deb Haaland, plus lacrosse, the Three Sisters, wampum, totem poles and powwows. It also covers Indigenous Peoples' Day itself: when it falls, the city that started it in 1992, the states that have adopted it and the first president to proclaim it. Written to be respectful and accurate rather than nostalgic. Every answer was checked against a documented source and the citation sits under each explanation.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01As of 2020, how many tribal governments held federal recognition in the United States?
574
The count reached 574 in December 2019, when the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians gained recognition through that year's defense authorization act.
Q 02Roughly how many people reported Cherokee ancestry in the 2020 US census?
About 1.45 million
The 2020 census counted about 1.45 million people reporting Cherokee ancestry alone or in combination, the largest tribal grouping; the Navajo lead only when single-race respondents are counted.
Q 03The Navajo Nation occupies parts of Arizona, New Mexico and which third state?
Utah
Utah holds the reservation's northern strip around Monument Valley and Montezuma Creek; the 1868 treaty signed at Bosque Redondo created the reservation, whose capital is Window Rock, Arizona.
Q 04The pre-Columbian city of Cahokia sat across the Mississippi from which modern city?
St. Louis
Cahokia lies across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Missouri; it peaked around 1100 CE with a population estimated at 10,000 to 20,000, and its Monks Mound is the largest earthen structure north of Mexico.
Q 05Colorado's Mesa Verde takes its name from Spanish words meaning what?
Green table
Mesa Verde means 'green table' in Spanish, for the juniper-covered plateau; the park, created in 1906, protects about 600 cliff dwellings, of which Cliff Palace is the best known.
Q 06What outsider name for Ancestral Puebloans is shunned since it can mean 'ancient enemies'?
Anasazi
Anasazi comes from a Navajo word usually rendered 'ancient enemies' or 'enemy ancestors', so 'Ancestral Puebloans' replaced it in archaeological usage from the 1990s; their kivas, sunken ceremonial rooms, spanned the Four Corners region.
Q 07The Haudenosaunee were the Five Nations until 1722, when which people joined to make six?
Tuscarora
The Tuscarora, driven from North Carolina after the 1711-1713 Tuscarora War, were admitted as the sixth nation; the original five were the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca.
Q 08According to Haudenosaunee oral history, the confederacy was founded under a constitution called what?
The Great Law of Peace
The Great Law of Peace (Gayanashagowa) is the oral constitution the Peacemaker and Hiawatha brought to the five nations; proposed founding dates range from 1142 to the mid-1500s.
Q 09Sequoyah, a silversmith of the Cherokee Nation, completed which invention in 1821?
A syllabary for writing his language
The Cherokee Nation adopted it in 1825 and reached near-total literacy within 25 years, higher than surrounding settlers; the Cherokee Phoenix became North America's first bilingual newspaper.
Q 10The Indian Removal Act, which led to the Trail of Tears, was signed into law in which year?
1830
Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act on 28 May 1830, over the objections of Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett; it authorised exchanging eastern tribal lands for land west of the Mississippi.
Q 11Which of these was NOT one of the 'Five Civilized Tribes' removed on the Trail of Tears?
Comanche
The Comanche were Plains people of Texas and Oklahoma, never among the five; the Five Civilized Tribes were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole, roughly 60,000 of whom were forced west.
Q 12The 1838 Cherokee removal was hastened by the discovery of what near Dahlonega, Georgia?
Gold
Gold was found near Dahlonega in 1828, setting off the Georgia Gold Rush and sharpening the state's push to seize Cherokee land; the Cherokee were marched west in 1838.
Q 13Present-day Oklahoma was designated as what before it became a state in 1907?
Indian Territory
Q 21Chief Joseph led his Nez Perce band on a months-long flight in 1877 toward asylum in which country?
Canada
Canada was the goal: after about 1,170 miles the Nez Perce were cornered at the Bear Paw Mountains, roughly 40 miles short of the border, where Sitting Bull's Lakota had already found refuge.
Q 22Geronimo, who surrendered for the last time in 1886, belonged to which people?
Apache
Geronimo was a Bedonkohe Apache medicine man and raid leader rather than a chief; he died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909, four years after riding in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade.
Q 23The Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890 took place on which reservation in South Dakota?
Pine Ridge
Indian Territory was the land set aside west of Arkansas for removed eastern nations from the 1830s; its western half became Oklahoma Territory in 1890, and the two merged into the state of Oklahoma in 1907.
Q 14Squanto, who taught the Pilgrims to plant and fertilise crops, learned English how?
He was kidnapped and sold in Spain
Thomas Hunt trafficked him to Málaga in 1614; he returned in 1619 to find his Patuxet village wiped out by epidemic.
Q 15Pocahontas married which Jamestown tobacco planter in 1614?
John Rolfe
John Rolfe, who pioneered Virginia's export tobacco, married her in April 1614; baptised as Rebecca, she died at Gravesend, England, in 1617 aged about 21, and the John Smith romance is a later invention.
Q 16Sacagawea gave birth during the Lewis and Clark expedition to a son nicknamed what by the captains?
Pomp
Clark nicknamed the baby Pomp, or Pompy; Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was born at Fort Mandan in February 1805 and travelled the whole route in a cradleboard, and Clark named Pompeys Pillar after him.
Q 17Sacagawea was taken from her Lemhi Shoshone people at about age 12 in a raid by which tribe?
Hidatsa
A Hidatsa war party seized her around 1800 near the Three Forks of the Missouri and took her to their villages on the Knife River, where the trapper Toussaint Charbonneau later took her as a wife.
Q 18The Shawnee leader Tecumseh, who built a pan-tribal confederacy, was killed in 1813 fighting where?
Thames
Tecumseh fell at the Battle of the Thames, near Moraviantown in present-day Ontario, on 5 October 1813; his brother Tenskwatawa, 'the Prophet', had lost Prophetstown at Tippecanoe in 1811.
Q 19Custer's 7th Cavalry was defeated at the Little Bighorn in June 1876 in which present-day state?
Montana
The battlefield lies on the Crow reservation in southeastern Montana, near Crow Agency; the Lakota call it the Greasy Grass, and 268 soldiers died, including Custer, two brothers, a nephew and a brother-in-law.
Q 20Before Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had a vision of soldiers 'as thick as grasshoppers' doing what?
Falling upside down into the camp
At a Sun Dance weeks before the battle, Sitting Bull saw soldiers falling upside down into the camp, read as a promised victory; he later toured with Buffalo Bill and was killed by agency police at Standing Rock in 1890.
On the Pine Ridge reservation, along Wounded Knee Creek, the 7th Cavalry killed between 250 and 300 Lakota; the Army awarded 20 Medals of Honor for the action, and Congress expressed 'deep regret' in a 1990 resolution.
Q 24The Army's fear that triggered Wounded Knee centred on which religious movement?
The Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance, spread by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, promised the return of the buffalo and the dead; Sitting Bull was killed two weeks before the massacre during an arrest meant to stop him joining it.
Q 25In which year was the Indian Citizenship Act, granting citizenship to all US-born Native Americans, signed?
1924
Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act on 2 June 1924; several states kept barring Native voting for decades, with Arizona and New Mexico holding out until court rulings in 1948.
Q 26Jim Thorpe, of the Sac and Fox Nation, won gold in which two events at the 1912 Olympics?
Pentathlon and decathlon
Thorpe won both the pentathlon and the decathlon at Stockholm 1912 but was stripped of the medals for having played semi-pro baseball; the IOC restored them in 1983 and named him sole champion in 2022.
Q 27Jim Thorpe attended which Pennsylvania boarding institution, starring in football under Pop Warner?
Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded by Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, was the flagship of a federal boarding-school system whose stated aim was to 'kill the Indian and save the man'; Thorpe starred there under Pop Warner.
Q 28The most famous code talkers of World War II were recruited for which branch of the US military?
The Marine Corps
The Marine Corps recruited the Navajo code talkers after civil engineer Philip Johnston proposed using their language; the first 29 reached boot camp in May 1942, and the Japanese never broke the code.
Q 29Because their language had no word for submarine, the code talkers rendered it as what?
Iron fish
Submarine became besh-lo, 'iron fish', in the Navajo code; at Iwo Jima six Navajo talkers worked round the clock for two days, and the signal officer said the island would not have been taken without them.
Q 30Native code talking was first used by the US military in which war, with Choctaw and Cherokee speakers?
World War I
Choctaw soldiers of the 36th Division first relayed orders in their own language in October 1918, near the end of World War I; in the next war the Army fielded Hopi, Meskwaki and other talkers.