Native American History
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109 free Native American History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
52 free Native American history trivia questions with answers. Native American history stretches from a Mississippian city bigger than medieval London to a Kaw Nation citizen serving as vice president, with a Cherokee silversmith who invented an alphabet, Navajo Marines whose code was never broken and a Sac and Fox athlete the King of Sweden called the greatest in the world along the way. This quiz spans it all: how many federally recognised tribes there are and which are the largest, Cahokia and Mesa Verde, the Haudenosaunee confederacy, Squanto, Pocahontas and Sacagawea, Tecumseh, the Trail of Tears, Sequoyah's syllabary, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Little Bighorn, Chief Joseph and Geronimo, Wounded Knee, the 1924 Citizenship Act, Jim Thorpe, the code talkers, Wilma Mankiller, Charles Curtis and Deb Haaland, plus lacrosse, the Three Sisters, wampum, totem poles and powwows. It also covers Indigenous Peoples' Day itself: when it falls, the city that started it in 1992, the states that have adopted it and the first president to proclaim it. Written to be respectful and accurate rather than nostalgic. Every answer was checked against a documented source and the citation sits under each explanation.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01As of 2026, which state holds about 40 percent of federally recognized tribes, mostly small villages?
Alaska
Alaska has nearly 230 of the 575 federally recognized tribes because each of its Native villages is listed as a tribe in its own right; the total reached 575 in December 2025, when the Lumbee were added.
Q 02Roughly how many people reported Cherokee ancestry in the 2020 US census?
About 1.45 million
The 2020 census counted about 1.45 million people reporting Cherokee ancestry alone or in combination, the largest tribal grouping; the Navajo lead only when single-race respondents are counted.
Q 03The Navajo Nation covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico and which third state, which shares Monument Valley?
Utah
Utah holds the reservation's northern strip; the 1868 treaty that created it let the Navajo return home from internment at Fort Sumner, and the nation is now larger than ten of the US states.
Q 04The pre-Columbian city of Cahokia sat across the Mississippi from which modern city?
St. Louis
St. Louis faces Cahokia across the Mississippi; the city held an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people around 1100, and its 100-foot Monks Mound was raised by workers carrying earth in baskets.
Q 05Mesa Verde National Park takes its name from Spanish words meaning what?
Green table
Green table is what the Spanish 'mesa verde' means; the people who lived there raised most of its cliff dwellings between about 1180 and 1300, then migrated away to the south.
Q 06What outsider name for Ancestral Puebloans is shunned since it can mean 'enemy ancestors'?
Anasazi
Anasazi is a Navajo word for a people the Navajo do not descend from; their Hopi descendants say Hisatsinom, 'ancient people', instead.
Q 07The Haudenosaunee became the Six Nations in 1722 when which people, driven north from Carolina, joined?
Tuscarora
The Tuscarora went to war in 1711 after colonists seized their land and sold their people into slavery; beaten, they moved north to their Iroquoian-speaking kin and were admitted as the sixth nation.
Q 08According to Haudenosaunee oral history, the confederacy was founded under a constitution called what?
The Great Law of Peace
The Great Law of Peace was carried from nation to nation by the Great Peacemaker, who had the chiefs bury their weapons beneath a white pine, the Tree of Peace.
Q 09Sequoyah, a silversmith of the Cherokee Nation, completed which invention in 1821?
A syllabary for writing his language
A syllabary for writing his language took Sequoyah about twelve years and 86 symbols, though he himself never learned to read or write English.
Q 10Which president signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson signed it over the opposition of fellow Tennessean Davy Crockett, who broke with him over the bill and lost his seat in Congress the next year.
Q 11What name is given to the Cherokee's forced march west in 1838?
Trail of Tears
The Trail of Tears came even though the Supreme Court had sided with the Cherokee against Georgia in 1832: Georgia ignored the ruling, and the army marched them west six years later.
Q 12The 1838 Cherokee removal was hastened by the discovery of what near Dahlonega, Georgia?
Gold
Gold drew thousands of prospectors onto Cherokee land from 1829, and Georgia raffled that land to settlers in its 1832 lottery, six years before the army marched the Cherokee west.
Q 13Before statehood in 1907, the eastern half of present-day Oklahoma was known as what?
Indian Territory
Q 21Which Nez Perce leader surrendered in 1877 about 40 miles short of the Canadian border?
Chief Joseph
Chief Joseph gave up in the Bear Paw Mountains after a fighting retreat of more than 1,000 miles, with a speech remembered for the line 'I will fight no more forever'.
Q 22Geronimo, who surrendered for the last time in 1886, belonged to which people?
Apache
Geronimo was a Bedonkohe Apache medicine man and raid leader rather than a chief; he died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909, four years after riding in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade.
Q 23The Wounded Knee Massacre of December 1890 took place on which Lakota reservation?
Pine Ridge
Indian Territory's nations asked Congress in 1905 to admit them as a state of their own, named Sequoyah; Congress declined and merged them with Oklahoma Territory into a single state in 1907.
Q 14How did Squanto, the Pilgrims' go-between, come to speak English?
He was kidnapped and taken to Europe
He was kidnapped and taken to Europe in 1614 by the English captain Thomas Hunt, who meant to sell him in Malaga; he reached England, sailed home in 1619 and found his village wiped out by disease.
Q 15Pocahontas married which Jamestown tobacco planter in 1614?
John Rolfe
John Rolfe married her in April 1614, and peace held for as long as her father lived; the famous romance with John Smith, whom she met as a child, is a later invention.
Q 16In 1805 Lewis and Clark bargained with a Shoshone band, led by Sacagawea's brother, for what?
Horses
Horses were what the captains needed to cross the Rockies, and the talks went well: the chief, Cameahwait, proved to be the brother Sacagawea had last seen before Hidatsa raiders carried her off as a girl.
Q 17Sacagawea is often called Lewis and Clark's guide, but what was her main job on the expedition?
Interpreter
Interpreter was why the captains took her: they hired her husband on the understanding that she would come to speak Shoshone. Clark added that a woman among the men reassured the peoples they met, since no war party travelled with one.
Q 18Which Shawnee leader built a pan-tribal confederacy and died fighting beside the British in the War of 1812?
Tecumseh
Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in Ontario in 1813, and his confederacy collapsed with him, ending organised Native resistance in the Ohio Valley.
Q 19Custer's 7th Cavalry was defeated at the Little Bighorn in June 1876 in which present-day state?
Montana
In Montana, Custer and every man in his immediate command were killed, but the victory was short-lived: the army poured in troops, and within a year Sitting Bull had fled the country.
Q 20Before Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had a vision of soldiers as thick as grasshoppers doing what?
Falling upside down into the camp
Falling upside down into the camp was what he saw in a trance during a ceremony about three weeks before the battle; his people took it as a promise of victory.
On the Pine Ridge reservation, the 7th Cavalry killed as many as 300 Lakota beside Wounded Knee Creek; soldiers received Medals of Honor for it, which a 2019 bill in Congress sought to rescind.
Q 24The Army's fear that triggered Wounded Knee centred on which religious movement?
The Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance, spread by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, promised the return of the buffalo and the dead; Sitting Bull was killed two weeks before the massacre during an arrest meant to stop him joining it.
Q 25After the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, Arizona still barred Native Americans from what until 1948?
Voting
Voting was governed by state law: Arizona's courts had ruled reservation residents to be 'persons under guardianship', and only a 1948 ruling struck that down.
Q 26Jim Thorpe, of the Sac and Fox Nation, won gold in which two events at the 1912 Olympics?
Pentathlon and decathlon
Pentathlon and decathlon were both his at Stockholm, but he lost the medals for having played semi-pro baseball; the IOC returned them in 1983 and named him sole champion in 2022.
Q 27Jim Thorpe attended which Pennsylvania boarding institution, starring in football under Pop Warner?
Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Carlisle Indian Industrial School cut pupils' hair, changed their names and banned their languages, following founder Richard Pratt's creed: 'Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.'
Q 28The most famous code talkers of World War II were recruited for which branch of the US military?
The Marine Corps
The Marine Corps recruited the Navajo code talkers after civil engineer Philip Johnston proposed using their language; the first 29 reached boot camp in May 1942, and the Japanese never broke the code.
Q 29Because their language had no word for submarine, the code talkers rendered it as what?
Iron fish
Submarine became besh-lo, 'iron fish', in the Navajo code; at Iwo Jima six Navajo talkers worked round the clock for two days, and the signal officer said the island would not have been taken without them.
Q 30Native code talking was first used by the US military in which war, with Choctaw and Cherokee speakers?
World War I
World War I was in its final weeks when Choctaw soldiers of the 36th Division began phoning orders in their own language, because the Germans were tapping Allied lines.