Native American Studies

Lesson One

For secondary students . . .

This lesson does not deal directly with Jed Smith. However, it does ask students to emulate Jed’s desire to know more about Native peoples.

Jed had direct contact with at least 30 Indian tribes as he traveled the West. He named and located nearly all of them on his master map, according to historians Dale Morgan and Carl Wheat, who add that “. . . for the most part he adopts Indian nomenclature or applies the names of tribes to features of the geography.” Jed, say Morgan and Wheat, “was the first man to produce an ethnographic survey of the West as a whole.” Jed wanted to “learn” the West, and he included the Native population in his study.

• Have students choose one Indian tribe for your project. You may wish to have them research one of the Native tribes with whom Jed interacted in a significant way, particularly the Sioux, the Absaroka (Crow), the Arikara, the Mojave, the Kelawatset (Lower Umpqua), the Shoshone (Snake), or the Comanche. However, you may allow students to choose any other tribe.
• The students’ task is to gather information and create a profile of one Indian tribe. Because this topic is far too broad for a relatively short paper, they must limit their approach.
• Here are just a few suggestions for learning about a particular tribe: