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Immigrants United States Imperialism United States History Indians of North America History Indians of North America Social life and customs Industries United States History United States Economic conditions United States History Civil War, 1861-1865 United States History Study and teaching United States Territorial expansion West (U.S.) HistorySummary: Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North created the very genre of film documentary, with its documentation of Nanook the Inuit and the Eskimo traditions which were even then being threatened by the influences of whites. This program revisits the site of Flaherty's filming, and learns that he staged much of what he filmed, sired children to whose future he paid no heed, and is himself now part of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Once forced to hide their heritage, Native Americans now enjoy both an acceptance and a celebration of their history and culture. By presenting the experiences of Native Americans from a wide array of fields including artisans, performers, and teachers, this program shows how many tribes are returning to the traditions and spirituality of their ancestors. Among those interviewed are Kevin...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Experience the rich cultural diversity of Native American tribes and the impact that early white explorers had on their lives. In this program, viewers will learn about the mysterious disappearance of the Anasazi culture and the successful Pueblo revolt against their Spanish conquerors. First-person accounts bring to life the adventures of early explorers, from Cabeza de Vaca, the first white...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1996
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Summary: Sixteen skeletons-what is left of a 9th-century Mayan royal family-are discovered in the ancient city of Cancuen. Can their remains tell us anything about the collapse of the Mayan Empire? Did disease, starvation, or drought bring about that calamity? A crack team of experts from Guatemala's Forensic Anthropology Foundation uses its experience with wartime atrocities to investigate. While...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: As the last great Aztec ruler, Montezuma II inherited a sprawling yet fragile empire. This program studies his governance, its abrupt end at the hands of the conquistadors, and its historical meanings. Paralleling a major exhibition at the British Museum, the film features artifacts, architecture, and images that speak to Montezuma's humanity, his self-proclaimed divinity, and the cultural...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: This poignant collage features members of the Oglala Lakota Sioux living on and off the Pine Ridge reservation who present their unself-pitying yet pointed observations on Lakota history and modern-day Lakota life. Their creation myth and their attitudes toward Mother Earth and the concept of time contribute insights into their worldview, while footage of a major powwow and a tepee-raising...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: The Yuroks, California's largest Native American tribe, have lived near the mouth of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers for 10,000 years. This program details the many problems that beset them as they try to survive: their lands overrun by prospectors and soldiers in the 19th century, the primeval forest cut by lumber companies, environmental destruction that has nearly wiped out the fish on which...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: The remains of more than 10,000 Native Americans unearthed at archaeological sites across the U.S. are in the possession of museums such as the Smithsonian. Is the analysis of the bones valid scientific research, or is it a desecration of Native American culture? This program focuses on the tensions between scientists, historians, and museum curators and Native American groups, as the bones...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program explains how the transcontinental railroad was built, and then how it opened up the West to European settlers and brought on the extermination of the buffalo and the defeat of Southern Plains Indian tribes. Viewers will witness the transformation through first-person accounts from Native Americans, European immigrants, Chinese laborers, buffalo hunters, homesteaders from the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1996
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Summary: Red Cloud, head Chief of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux), from 1868 to 1909, was one of the most capable Native American opponents the United States Army faced. He led a successful conflict in 1866?1868 known as Red Cloud's War over control of the Powder River Country in northwestern Wyoming and southern Montana. After the Treaty of Fort Laramie, he led his people in the important transition to...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: This episode begins in March of 1621, in what is now southeastern Massachusetts, when Massasoit, the leading sachem of the Wampanoag, negotiated with a ragged group of English colonists. The pale-skinned Pilgrim foreigners were in desperate need of Native help. Massasoit’s people had been decimated by unexplained sickness, and he calculated that an alliance with the foreigners could help...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Many Americans who set out to change the West found the West changed them instead. This program explores a broad panorama of western experiences: those of Great Plains homesteaders and farmers, Chinese immigrants and Hispanic townspeople in California, Mormons in Utah, Buffalo Bill Cody, cowboys during the fall of the great ranching boom, African-American sharecroppers seeking a “promised...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1996
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program examines the impact of slavery and the Civil War in the West. Viewers learn about “Bleeding Kansas,” the “Gettysburg of the West,” and how the end of the fighting brought on the beginning of the military campaign against Indians. Included are portrayals of individuals who resisted federal authority, such as Brigham Young and Black Kettle.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1996
View online at AVOD
Summary: In United States history, an Indian agent was an individual authorized to interact with Native American tribes on behalf of the U.S. government. Indian agents, whether missionaries or political appointees, affect reservation life.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
View online at AVOD
Summary: An Emmy® award-winning program, this episode from the PBS American Experience collection investigates the 1876 event that has become American folklore—the Battle of Little Big Horn—also known as “Custer's Last Stand.” Using journals, oral accounts, and Native American ledger drawings as well as archival and feature films, this program explores this watershed moment from two views: white and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2004
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Summary: From Mexican landowners in California to Native American tribes in the Black Hills of South Dakota, this film examines various perspectives on territorial claims to the West and the history of U.S. annexation. This program explains how events, such as the Texas War of Independence, opened the door to U.S. annexation. Diary excerpts, letters, and other primary resources vividly portray the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1996
View online at AVOD
Summary: For decades in the 19th century, Apache tribes resisted the westward advance of the pioneers and the threat they posed to traditional ways of life. Fighting the longest was Geronimo—one of the most famous, feared, and misunderstood Native American warriors in history. Geronimo and the Apache Resistance, from the PBS American Experience collection, separates myth from reality in the tragic...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1988
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Summary: This program examines the friction caused by westward expansion of white settlers from the colonial period through the 19th century and the near obliteration of America's indigenous population and their culture.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program explores the many similarities among tribal nations, including a profound respect for nature, myth, and tradition; matriarchal governance; a communal lifestyle; a belief in an afterlife; and the use of pictographs, symbols, and patterns rather than an alphabet-based language. Also featured are brief scenes of re-created warfare: the French and Iroquois vs. the British as a part of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Outside the boundaries of America's collective folk imagination and underlying the sweeping narrative of U.S. history lies the lived experience of the nation's westward pioneers. Without exaggeration or embellishment, this captivating documentary focuses on the lives of the common people who headed West between the early 1860s and the turn of the 20th century. Accounts of personal challenges...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: In the spring of 1805, Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee, fell into a deep trance and claimed to have met the Master of Life, who told him that the Indians were in dire straits because they had adopted white culture and rejected traditional spiritual ways. In this episode the young prophet starts a spiritual revival movement that drew thousands of adherents from tribes across the Midwest. His elder...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: On the night of February 27, 1973, American Indian Movement (AIM) and Oglala Lakota activists seized the hamlet of Wounded Knee, and police cordoned off the area. Demanding redress for grievances, the protesters captured the world's attention for 71 gripping days. With heavily armed federal troops tightening a cordon around the Indians, the event recalled the massacre at Wounded Knee almost a...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: In its time, their journey equaled a voyage to the moon. It took place before the American west became known as "the frontier," when Europeans understood little about what lay within the continent. Courageous in spirit and unyielding in their dedication to the mission, Meriweather Lewis and William Clark led 31 people from the mouth of the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean and back. In doing...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
View online at AVOD
Summary: While America was founded as a free land in which people could live out their own destinies, it came at a terrible cost to Native Americans. The Pilgrims laid the groundwork for religious freedom, while the Puritan-led Salem Witch Trials were a frightening reminder of superstition and intolerance. The nation's population migrates westward, emboldened by a new philosophy called Manifest Destiny;...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2002