Historical Thinking Concepts
This historical thinking concept focuses on understanding why events happened and what resulted from them.
What is Cause and Consequence?
This land bridge connected Asia and North America during the Ice Age.
What is Beringia (the Beringia Land Bridge)?
This term refers to large animals like mammoths and giant sloths that lived during the Ice Age.
What are megafauna?
This name is used by many Indigenous Peoples to refer to North America.
What is Turtle Island?
Indigenous Peoples of the Northwest Coast relied heavily on this natural resource for food and survival.
What is salmon (or fishing)?
This term describes judging another culture based on the values and standards of your own culture.
What is ethnocentrism?
This migration theory suggests early peoples traveled by boat along the Pacific coastline.
What is the Coastal Route Theory?
This 13,200-year-old footprint found on the Northwest Coast belonged to this group.
What is a child?
In Turtle Island stories, this animal supports the world and symbolizes life.
What is the turtle?
These tall carvings recorded family histories, spiritual beliefs, and important animals.
What are totem poles?
This concept asks historians to consider moral questions and responsibilities connected to past events.
What is the Ethical Dimension?
This theory proposes that migrants traveled overland through a corridor between massive glaciers.
What is the Ice-Free Corridor Theory?
Footprints near ancient cave paintings suggest this group was involved in creating Ice Age art.
Who are children?
This type of creation story involves animals diving into water to bring up soil to form the world.
What is an earth-diver myth?
European explorers like George Vancouver mistakenly believed this about Indigenous land after disease outbreaks.
What is that the land had always been uninhabited?
This term refers to a personal or cultural viewpoint that influences how information is interpreted.
What is bias?
The Beringia Land Bridge existed because ocean levels dropped due to this global climate condition.
What is glaciation (the Ice Age)?
This teenage girl, who lived over 12,000 years ago, was discovered in a flooded cave system in Mexico.
Who is Naia?
These stories were passed down orally to preserve spiritual beliefs, history, and life lessons.
What are oral traditions?
This disease had a devastating impact on Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest.
What is smallpox?
Trying to understand and present historical information fairly, without personal opinions or preconceived ideas, is known as this concept.
What is objectivity?
Archaeological discoveries such as ancient coastal footprints support this theory by showing early human presence along the coast.
What is the Coastal Route Theory?
Climate warming and this human activity are two major reasons why many megafauna became extinct.
What is human hunting?
Understanding Indigenous creation stories requires historians to value Indigenous knowledge systems rather than judging them by European standards.
What is rejecting ethnocentrism?
This day commemorates the experiences of Indigenous children in residential schools and promotes truth, remembrance, and healing.
What is Orange Shirt Day?