Native America
“Native America” explores the world created by America’s First Peoples. The four-part series reaches back 15,000 years to reveal massive cities aligned to the stars, unique systems of science and spirituality, and 100 million people connected by social networks spanning two continents.
Rhode Island PBS Passport
Rhode Island PBS Passport
Episode 1 ~ Combine ancient wisdom and modern science to answer a 15,000-year-old question: who were America’s First Peoples? The answer hides in Amazonian cave paintings, Mexican burial chambers, New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and waves off California’s coast.
Episode 2 ~ Explore the rise of great American nations, from monarchies to democracies. Investigate lost cities in Mexico, a temple in Peru, a potlatch ceremony in the Pacific Northwest and a tapestry of shell beads in upstate New York whose story inspired our own democracy.
Episode 3 ~ Discover the cosmological secrets behind America’s ancient cities. Scientists explore some of the world’s largest pyramids and 3D-scan a lost city of monumental mounds on the Mississippi River; native elders reveal ancient powers of the sky.
Episode 4 ~ Discover how resistance, survival and revival are revealed through an empire of horse-mounted Comanche warriors, secret messages encoded in an Aztec manuscript and a grass bridge in the Andes that spans mountains and centuries.
Native America in the Classroom
Native America in the Classroom
These sacred stories stories explain the origins of aspects of six different Native American civilizations. The stories have been passed down, mostly orally though also through pictographs and records, from generation to generation.
The Aztecs created their calendar around the positions of the sun at different times of the year. The vast Incan Empire boasted a population of 12 million people and covered 6 modern countries at its height, and was carefully connected by a network of roads.
Explore the formation and rise of American participatory democracy that informed the work of Ben Franklin and the Founding Fathers when they drafted the U.S. Constitution 500 years later.
Watch all four episodes of Native America in full.