Building on the ten themes of the National Council for the Social Studies’ national curriculum standards, NMAI’s Essential Understandings reveal key concepts about the rich and diverse cultures, histories, and contemporary lives of Native peoples. These concepts reflect a multitude of untold stories about American Indians that can deepen and expand your teaching of history, geography, civics, economics, science, engineering, and other subject areas.
This resource addresses the following Essential Understandings:
1: American Indian Cultures
For millennia, American Indians have shaped and been shaped by their culture and environment. Elders in each generation teach the next generation their values, traditions, and beliefs through their own tribal languages, social practices, arts, music, ceremonies, and customs.
American Indian cultures have always been dynamic and changing.
Interactions with Europeans and Americans brought accelerated and often devastating changes to American Indian cultures.
Native people continue to fight to maintain the integrity and viability of Indigenous societies. American Indian history is one of cultural persistence, creative adaptation, renewal, and resilience.
2: Time, Continuity, and Change
The Western Hemisphere was laced with diverse, well-developed, and complex societies that interacted with one another over millennia.
American Indian history is not singular or timeless. American Indian cultures have always adapted and changed in response to environmental, economic, social, and other factors. American Indian cultures and people are fully engaged in the modern world.
European contact resulted in devastating loss of life, disruption of tradition, and enormous loss of lands for American Indians.
Hearing and understanding American Indian history from Indian perspectives provides an important point of view to the discussion of history and cultures in the Americas. Indian perspectives expand the social, political, and economic dialogue.
3: People, Places and Environments
For thousands of years, Indigenous people have studied, managed, honored, and thrived in their homelands. These foundations continue to influence American Indian relationships and interactions with the land today.
European contact resulted in exposure to Old World diseases, displacement, and wars, devastating the underlying foundations of American Indian societies.
Throughout their histories, Native groups have relocated and successfully adapted to new places and environments.
The imposition of international, state, reservation, and other borders on Native lands changed relationships between people and their environments, affected how people lived, and sometimes isolated tribal citizens and family members from one another.
4: Individual Development and Identity
American Indian individual development and identity is tied to culture and the forces that have influenced and changed culture over time.
Historically, well-established conventions and practices nurtured and promoted the development of individual identity.
Contact with Europeans and Americans disrupted and transformed traditional norms for identity development.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many American Indian communities have sought to revitalize and reclaim their languages and cultures.