About this ebook
For fifteen thousand years before the Mayflower, millions of people built cities, engineered irrigation systems, and created civilizations across North America. Cahokia rivaled medieval London. The Ancestral Puebloans built four-story apartment complexes. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy inspired the Founding Fathers.
Then came 1492. Within a century, ninety percent of the Native population was gone.
Native America: The Epic History of a Forgotten People traces the complete arc of indigenous history—from the Ice Age migrations through the Contact period, the resistance wars of Metacom, Pontiac, and Tecumseh, the Trail of Tears, Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, the boarding school era, and the modern fight for sovereignty.
You'll meet Red Cloud, the only Native leader who won a war against the United States. Sitting Bull, who defeated Custer. Geronimo, who held off five thousand soldiers with forty warriors.
Drawing on archaeology, treaty documents, and firsthand accounts, this book reveals how Native peoples shaped the continent's ecology, how disease killed more Indians than all the wars combined, and how activists at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee sparked a cultural renaissance still unfolding today.
This is not a story of inevitable vanishing. It is an account of survival against impossible odds—of languages revived, cultures adapted, peoples declared extinct who refused to disappear.
American history begins here. It's time the rest of us remembered.
