Title: Week 2 Overview and Inquiry
Course: The American West: Power, Place, and Memory > Section: Week 2 · August 31–September 4, 2026: Indigenous Worlds and Competing Empires, 1700s

WEEK 2 · INQUIRY MODULE

Week 2: Indigenous Worlds and Competing Empires, 1700s

Who held continental power in the eighteenth-century West, and how did mobility make that power?

Dates: August 31–September 4, 2026

Focus

- Comanche, Lakota, Pueblo, and other Indigenous polities
- Spanish, French, British, and Native diplomacy
- Horses, trade, disease, kinship, and captive exchange

Before class

1. Read: American Yawp, chapters 2–4 selected sections.
2. Open and inspect the linked primary-source collection(s). Record one source, one context question, and one limitation.
3. Scholarship lens: Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent (2022), selected excerpt; Anne F. Hyde, Born of Lakes and Plains (2022), selected excerpt.

Primary-source portals

- Native Knowledge 360° teaching resources
- Library of Congress Indigenous Peoples of the Americas collections

Tuesday/Thursday meeting plan

Date | Status | Plan
Tuesday, September 1 | Class | Indigenous polities, mobility, kinship, and competing imperial claims in the eighteenth century.
Thursday, September 3 | Class | Horses, trade, diplomacy, captive exchange, and a scale-of-power evidence lab.

Reading & Reasoning Check 1 due Friday, September 4.

After class

Deliverable: Reading & Reasoning Check 1.

- I can answer the weekly inquiry with a contestable claim.
- I can name at least two pieces of evidence and explain their limits.
- I can identify an interpretation that my evidence supports, complicates, or challenges.