Native Peoples of North America

Totally biased and uninformative - I don't and won't recommend this course to anyone. The white settler is totally at fault, the Founding Fathers should be ashamed for their omissions in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

This is a horribly jaded series of lectures. The professor is obviously very learned but has an axe to grind and presents a very one-sided review of Native American history. Native Americans have done no wrong; white man Europeans have done all wrong. Anti-American and divisive. Progressive and yet stuck in the past. The professor loses credibility because he is so obviously promoting a cause rather than trying to stay as objective as possible. It sometimes feels like a call to pan-tribal arms against the United States… like physical warfare. Especially the last two lectures.

This title does not fit the course. This is a critical colonial revisionist history that covers next to nothing anthropologically or archeologically. Its insulting how little background to the tribes and what their traditions were in these lectures. Its just the interactions of Europeans and native tribes. Rename this lecture to reflect its skewed nature, then get someone like Edwin Barnhart up here so we can actually learn something instead of focusing on oppressor and oppressed survival coping narratives.

Based on the Title of the course I was hoping to learn more about the Native Peoples of North America. This course would have been better titled "Abuse of the Native Peoples of North America." I gave up after four lectures. It became obvious that there was just one theme throughout the course, and the one theme did not include "learning about Native Peoples of North America." Native Peoples were around for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived, but there was no discussion concerning those thousands of years, which I would have found fascinating. Obviously, I should have reviewed the lecture titles before ordering. I will exercise more caution in the future.

This series of lectures is not a history, but more of a prolonged advocacy for native Americans (living in the U.S.) The tone is very sermon like, and tends to make it sound like European settlers never did anything good; native Americans never did anything bad. I kept watching, because I wanted to improve my knowledge of current conditions in native American communities. It never mentioned alcoholism or abuse of native American women by native Americans. Some people believe that reviving knowledge of pre-colonial culture is one path towards improving the mental health and self-esteem of native American people. Reviving culture was discussed, but only in terms of contrast to its onslaught by Euro-American ideas and governmental policy. Though picking out instances of native Americans not being treated well is easy to do, I think that a history built on a review of all known facts, and not just cherry-picking instances to support a pre-conceived conclusion, would provide people with more useful information.

There are a number of generalized errors in this lecture series that I viewed at no extra cost on Amazon Prime. 1. As others have said, the title is misleading. A good title would be "350 years of conflict between Native Americans of the USA and European Colonists and their decendants". I too was expecting the lectures to be primarily about culture. What I heard was about all the conflict that happened and how most of the time, but not all of the time, the perpetrators of this conflict were the British and later the American settlers. 2. The instructor fails to compare the invasion of Europeans into North America with other major invasions in world history such as the Iberian Penninsula by Arabs and North Africans, Arabs and other Muslims into Southeast Europe, Germans into Britain, Incas into their neighbors, Mongols into China, British into Australia and New Zealand, etc. History is full of people from region A invading the territories of other people and taking over. How was this invasion different? 3. I don't recall the instructor ever saying that the depopulation of the natives by disease was inevitable, or saying that 90% of Native Americans died before they ever saw a European. Sooner or later the peoples of the Americas were going to have continued contact with other peoples of the world that would bring about massive death by disease. 4. Perhaps the biggest mistake made was viewing historical events and trends through the lens of 21st century ethics and morality. 5. And finally, I believe the instructor failed to recognize that the conflict that existed between the natives and the settlers was primarily one of culture; particularly in the area of land ownership, but also in authority, language, and communications.

As a fan of the Great Courses, an avid student of Native American history and someone very sympathetic to the oppression of indigenous people, I bought this course with high expectations. Regrettably, I found it very disappointing and superficial. The course tells essentially the same "noble savage" tale over and over: a history of peaceful indigenous tribes being the victims of white genocide. There is truth there, of course. But the history is much more complex and interesting than just that. The course largely ignores the differences between tribes, settlers, locations and events. It does not acknowledge that some tribes (such as the Comanche and Kiowa) were warrior cultures that engaged in acts of extreme violence and brutality toward other tribes as well as immigrant white settlers. It ignores that sometimes tribes entered into to treaties that they, too, had no intention of honoring. It fails to acknowledge that there were many in the white culture that were very sympathetic to the plight of the tribes. Most of all, it fails utterly to examine the underlying causes and nuances of white aggression toward native peoples, instead suggesting that the tribes always behaved nobly and only to defend their vast territories while the whites always were motivated solely by greed and racism. The history of native people is much more interesting and complex than that simple narrative. Fortunately, there are many more objective and interesting histories than this course (for example, the Pulitzer prize finalist book "Empire of the Summer Moon.").

I thought that this would be an in-depth history of Native Americans - possibly fooled by the picture of Ancestral Pueblo ruins on the cover and the title. But this is a somewhat revisionist presentation which focuses on the interactions between Native Americans and Europeans from "first contact" onward. Not what I expected.

I bought this course because it had the Smithsonian imprimatur. I expected an extensive and educational tour through the museum’s vast collection of Native American artifacts and stimulating lectures on various tribal lifestyles, customs, and histories. But this course should have been called “Native American/United States Government Relations” since two-thirds of the lectures are devoted to that subject. (Dr. Cobb rarely went north of the 49th parallel.) That is not to say that the course is completely devoid of information on indigenous culture. I enjoyed the first five lectures. And there are occasional interesting digressions in the later ones. But for the most part, the entire course deals, not with the culture of North America’s Native Peoples, but with their trying to cope with Europeans and their descendants. In fairness, Dr. Cobb was organized and had very good delivery. The visuals chosen for the course were excellent and often fascinating. The guidebook is well organized and informative. As a side note - the cover is emblazoned with the Smithsonian logo, but none of the photos are credited to the institution, and none of the most interesting course visuals are reproduced in the guidebook. For now, I’m still waiting for the course I anticipated to be developed.

This course should have been titled American History from the Native American Perspective. It was interesting, but I had hoped to learn more about various tribal culture and customs.