Until the latter half of the twentieth century, accounts of American history usually began with the arrival of Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) in 1492. Before Columbus went ashore on a small island in the Bahamas (a group of islands south of present-day Florida in the Caribbean Sea), however, native peoples had lived in North America for thousands of years. Nevertheless, for centuries historians chose to concentrate only on the story of Europeans in the "New World" (a European term for North and South America). Native Americans thus remained in the background of the narrative, portrayed either as passive observers or as wild savages.

One reason for the incomplete portrait of Native American culture was that documents from the colonial period presented only the European point of view. For instance, European explorers and settlers wrote detailed observations of Native American people and customs, kept records of treaties, and...