Native American & Indigenous Hertiage Month

(Documentary 46 minutes) Looking at the incredible array of telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory, one can appreciate just how advanced the science of astronomy has become. Travel to Mexico's Yucatan peninsula to get a first hand look at the ancient world's most skilled astronomers: the Maya. Host Michael Guillen studies the giant pyramid of Kukulkan and explains how, it functioned as a giant solar observatory. He examines the round structure at Tikal known as El Caracol which looks amazingly like a modern day observatory. Guillen demonstrates how the Maya might have used the sun to lay out their various temples and observatories and he examines their incredibly complex and accurate calendar. Learn how the Maya created vulcanized rubber in order to play their cosmological game of Pok-A-Pok.

(Documentary 54 minutes) This new "artistic and intellectual triumph" is by Patricia Amlin, the extraordinary animator who created our widely honored and best-selling film, "Popol Vuh: The Creation Myth of the Maya." Just as "Popol Vuh" took authentic images from ancient Maya ceramics and turned them into a riveting retelling of the Maya creation myth, so "The Five Suns" employs authentic pre-Columbian Aztec iconography to depict the most important creation myths and sacred stories of the Aztecs and other Nahuatl-speaking peoples of ancient central Mexico.All imagery derives from the colorful and brilliant art style of late post-Classic Mexico (A.D. 1250-1521), as taken from the body of pre-Conquest codices known collectively as the Borgia Group. These ancient screenfold books are filled with detailed and vivid scenes of native calendrics, rituals, mythical events, and cosmology."The Five Suns" tells how Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca create heaven and earth, journey to the underworld to create humans and find sustenance for them, and finally create the sun and the moon.

(Documentary, 1 hour 32 minutes) Cheyenne, Apache, Comanche, Sioux, and Navajo: their courage, spirit, and fight for survival are the stuff of American legend. This special reveals remarkable firsthand accounts and rare photographs that tell the real stories behind the 19th century's greatest warrior nations and the forces that destroyed their way of life.

(Documentary, 1 hour 29 minutes) In this feature-length documentary, Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond takes an entertaining and insightful look at the portrayal of North American Indigenous people throughout a century of cinema. Featuring hundreds of clips from old classics as well as recent releases, the film traces the evolution of the 'Hollywood Indian.' Diamond guides the audience on a journey across America to some of cinema's most iconic landscapes and conducts candid interviews with celebrities like Clint Eastwood, Robbie Robertson and Jim Jarmusch. The film is a loving look at cinema through the eyes of the people who appeared in its very first flickering images and have survived to tell their stories in their own way.

(Documentary, 1 hour 27 minutes) Indian Country Diaries goes inside modern Native American communities to reveal a diverse people working to revitalize their culture while improving the social, physical, and spiritual health of their people.

(Documentary, 1 hour 59 minutes) On a July day in 1990, a confrontation propelled Native issues in Kanehsatake and the village of Oka, Quebec, into the international spotlight. Director Alanis Obomsawin spent 78 nerve-wracking days and nights filming the armed stand-off between the Mohawks, the Quebec police and the Canadian army. This powerful documentary takes you right into the action of an age-old Aboriginal struggle. The result is a portrait of the people behind the barricades.

(TV episode, 54 minutes) From Caves to Cosmos focuses on the deep roots of Native America: Who are America’s First Peoples and how did they create their unique world? Answers emerge from Hopi Elders on pilgrimage at sacred Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert, scientists examining ancient cave painting in the Amazon jungle, Chumash boat builders exploring their tribe’s ancient migration legacy off California’s coast, and an archaeologist digging deep below a towering pyramid near Mexico City.

(TV episode, 54 minutes) Nature to Nations explores the rise of great American nations, from dynastic monarchies to participatory democracies. What lies behind these diverse and sophisticated governments? Answers emerge from an archaeologist excavating America’s oldest temple in the Peruvian Andes, a tribe initiating a new chief at a ceremony surrounded by cedar totem poles in the Pacific Northwest, an expert reading ancient hieroglyphs from a sarcophagus to tell a forgotten history of Maya kings, and the return of an ancient shell wampum belt to the birthplace of democracy near Syracuse, New York.

(TV episode, 54 minutes) Cities of the Sky explores the creation of some of the ancient world’s largest and most splendid cities. Were people across Native America inspired by celestial phenomenon to build their communities? Answers are revealed in American urban centers that bloomed from the Mexican jungle, a massive multi-cultural city in Central Mexico that is among the largest urban centers in history, and the capital of South America’s greatest empire.

(TV episode, 54 minutes) New World Rising reveals Native American cultural continuity in the face of genocidal warfare and history’s worst demographic devastation. Native Americans tap 10,000 years of beliefs to fight and survive the forces of Conquest.

(Documentary, 58 minutes) Nā Kamalei: The Men of Hula captures the journey of legendary master hula teacher Robert Cazimero and the only all-male hula school in Hawai'i as they prepare to compete in the world's largest hula festival.

(Documentary, 1 hour 28 minutes) The contemporary Native American Sobriety Movement is flourishing throughout the Indian communities of North America. In this spirited, inspiring, and hopeful documentary, American Indian health practitioners and traditional medicine people reveal the importance of tribal values and spiritual awareness in the recovery process. Few Americans are today aware that the U.S. and Canadian governments intentionally used alcohol in their attempts to destroy indigenous cultures and obtain Indian lands. The devastating effects of these policies were compounded by the propagation of the "drunken Indian" stereotype. Faced with the loss of their religion, land, culture, freedom, and pride, Indian families experienced a debilitating syndrome known as intergenerational trauma, an experience shared by many families affected by the Holocaust in Europe. Despite its powerful indictment of governmental abuse, the driving force of this film is the positive spirit emanating from the Indian people featured in it. Told in large part by recovering Native Americans, many of whom work as counselors, the film presents methods and tools that specifically enable alcoholics to help themselves. There is a strong emphasis on spiritual guidance and traditional Native thinking, both designed to encourage dignity and self-worth as a treatment plan. "The Red Road to Sobriety" is essential viewing in a variety of courses in Native American studies, religious studies and comparative religion, cultural anthropology, public health, psychology, and American history and studies.

(Documentary, 1 hour 24 minutes) In August 1993, Nā Maka o ka ‘Āina spent twelve days capturing on video the proceedings Ka Ho‘okolokolonui Kānaka Maoli — Peoples' International Tribunal Hawai‘i, 1993, in which the United States and the state of Hawai‘i were put on trial for crimes against the original people of Hawai‘i, the Kānaka Maoli.

(Documentary, 1 hour 15 minutes) Though the Cherokee embraced "civilization" and won recognition of tribal sovereignty in the U.S. Supreme Court, their resistance to removal from their homeland failed. Thousands were forced on a perilous march to Oklahoma.

Encyclopedia entry concerning indigenous languages and linguistics of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Extensive overviews of history, cultural areas, ways of life, impact of European contact, and American Indians in contemporary society.

Credo Reference encyclopedic entries concerning Indigenous peoples of the Americas (North, Central, and South America). Includes broad, introductory information, images, links to other relevant resources, and keyword concept map tools.

Credo Reference encyclopedic entries concerning Native Americans. Includes broad, introductory information, images, links to other relevant resources, and keyword concept map tools.

Credo Reference encyclopedic entries concerning the pre-Columbian era in the Americas. Includes broad, introductory information, images, maps, media, links to other relevant resources, and keyword concept map tools.

Explore manuscripts, artwork and rare printed books dating from the earliest contact with European settlers right up to photographs and newspapers from the mid-twentieth century. Browse through a wide range of rare and original documents from treaties, speeches and diaries, to historic maps and travel journals.

From historic pressings to contemporary periodicals, explore nearly 200 years of Indigenous print journalism from the US and Canada. With newspapers representing a huge variety in publisher, audience and era, discover how events were reported by and for Indigenous communities. This resource has been developed with, and has only been made possible by, the permission and contribution of the newspaper publishers and Tribal Councils concerned.

From early topographical sketches and pioneers’ accounts, to photographs of Buffalo Bill and his ‘Wild West’ stars, explore the fact and the fiction of westward expansion in America from the early eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Browse a wide range of rare and original documents including printed books, journals, historic maps, broadsides, periodicals, advertisements, photographs, artwork and more. American West is fully cross-searchable with the American Indian Histories and Cultures collection sourced from the Newberry Library’s prestigious Edward E. Ayer Collection. These collections complement each other brilliantly through related documents, valuable secondary resources and similar thematic content.

Colonial America makes available all 1,450 volumes of the CO 5 series from The National Archives, UK, covering the period 1606 to 1822. CO 5 consists of the original correspondence between the British government and the governments of the American colonies, making it a uniquely rich resource for all historians of the period.

This digital collection of primary source documents helps us to understand existence on the edges of the anglophone world from 1650-1920. Discover the various European and colonial frontier regions of North America, Africa and Australasia through documents that reveal the lives of settlers and indigenous peoples in these areas.