The first Americans

circa (about) 36,000 years ago An ancestral people living in Arctic Siberia in northeast Asia (a people from whom all Native Americans are descended) start to become isolated from other East Asian groups.

c. 26,500–12,000 years ago Last Glacial Maximum, the period when the ice sheets, formed during the most recent Ice Age, are at their greatest extent. During this period, sea levels are much lower—possibly up to 120 metres (400 feet)—as the world's water becomes “locked up” in the extensive ice.

c. 22,000 years ago (or possibly earlier) Vast ice sheets covering northern North America (called the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets) merge together east of the Rocky Mountains, closing off any migration route into the centre of North America. At the same time, glaciers in Alaska bar access to the Pacific coast from Beringia. This begins what archaeologists call the Beringian Standstill: the ancestral Arctic Siberian people who have migrated from northeast Asia cannot progress any further east or south, and so remain living in Beringia and Alaska.

c. 20,000 years ago The ancestral Arctic Siberian people splits into two branches: one gives rise to a people known as the Ancient Beringians; the other gives rise to the ancestors of all other Native Americans, who later expand into the rest of the Americas. (Some scientists believe that this split occurs while the ancestral people are still living in northeastern Asia, thousands of years earlier.)

Archaic period

c. 8000 BC The Archaic period begins. The climate becomes warmer and drier, and the last prehistoric “megafauna” (giant animals such as mastodons) die out. Most people still travel around hunting big game, but some groups become more settled and start to find their food locally, for example, small game, fish, wild vegetables and other plants. The Archaic period lasts until around 1000 BC.

c. 8000–1200 BC During this period, known as the Oshara Tradition, the people living in the American Southwest are nomadic hunter-gatherers. They hunt rabbits, deer, antelope and bighorn sheep using stone-tipped spears.

c. 2200–700 BC Poverty Point culture: some people start to settle in villages in the lower Mississippi Valley near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. At Poverty Point in northeastern Louisiana, they build large earthen mounds arranged around a central plaza.

c. 2100 BC Maize from Mexico is introduced in what is now the southwestern United States

c. 2000 BC Some people in what is now the southwestern US begin producing rock paintings, called petroglyphs.

c. 1200 BC Ancestral Puebloans (once known as the Anasazi) establish their culture in the present-day “Four Corners” region of the United States (southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado). They cultivate maize and squash.

Farmers and traders

c. 200 BC–400 AD Hopewell culture: a variety of different peoples living along the rivers of today's northeastern and midwestern United States. They build up an extensive trading network.

c. 200 AD–1450 The Hohokam people found a number of small villages along the Gila River in present-day Arizona. They build canals which they use to irrigate their crops of maize, squash and beans.

c. 700–1400 The Mogollon people live in southern New Mexico and Arizona, western Texas and northern Mexico.

c. 1000 Viking explorers encounter Native Americans in northern Newfoundland. These may have been ancestors of the Beothuk or Dorset inhabitants of Labrador and Newfoundland. The Vikings call them skraelings.

c. 1000–1500 Mississippian culture: a number of chiefdoms flourish in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and throughout the southeast United States. Cahokia, in present-day Illinois, a city of 20,000–30,000 people which is at its peak in about 1250, is a major religious centre and trading hub. The Mississippians build flat-topped earthwork mounds and temples. They cultivate maize on a large scale.

c. 1000–1300 Thule people, the ancestors of the Inuit, spread out from Alaska across Canada, reaching Greenland by about 1300.

c. 1150 With the onset of drought, the Ancestral Puebloans begin to abandon their villages in what is now the southwestern United States.

c. 1450 Iroquois League is formed from a confederation of five Iroquois nations: Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga and Seneca.

c. 1400 Drought, and possibly warfare, forces many Mississippian peoples to start moving away from their cities.

The arrival of Europeans

1513 The first official European expedition to North America is led by Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León, who lands in Florida and claims the region for Spain. He encounters the Calusa people, who are hostile.

16th century The Spanish bring horses to Mexico. Some of the horses escape and began to breed and increase their numbers in the wild. Native American tribes adopt the use of the animals to carry goods for exchange with neighbouring tribes, to hunt buffalo (bison) and to conduct horse raids.

1610–46 The Anglo-Powhatan Wars: three wars are fought between the English settlers of the Virginia Colony, and Indians of the Powhatan Confederacy. The first war (1610–14) is ended by the Peace of Pocahontas; the second is begun by the Indian Massacre of 1622, in which the Powhatan kill around a quarter of the Virginian colonists; the third (1644–46) ends when Opechancanough, chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, is captured and killed.

1614–20 Dutch and English seafarers and traders visiting New England introduce diseases (such as smallpox, influenza, typhus and measles) to which the Native Americans have no immunity, resulting in epidemics that wipe out as many as 90% of the indigenous population. The Wampanoag and neighbouring Massachusett tribes are particularly hard hit.

1620s Settlers arrive in present-day Massachusetts from England. They depend initially on the native Wampanoag tribes for survival (who teach the Europeans how to fish and grow crops). The Wampanoag trade furs for the copper kettles, arms and metal tools of the colonists.

1628 The Mohawks defeat the Mahicans, an Algonquian tribe, pushing them east of the Hudson River. This marks the start of the Beaver Wars.

1630s–1701 Beaver Wars: tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, attempting to take control of the fur trade with Europeans, wage war against the Huron, Algonquians and their French allies. During the wars, the Iroquois defeat several other large tribal confederacies, including the Huron, Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock and Shawnee, and become a dominant power in the Great Lakes region.

1636–38 The Pequot War in New England is fought between the Pequot tribe and the English colonists along with their Native American allies, the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes.

1754–63 French and Indian War: Native Americans fight on both sides of the conflict, using their alliances with either the French or British to battle with their traditional native enemies.

1769 Native peoples from local tribes in California are forced to work in Spanish missions.

1783 Treaty of Paris: Following their defeat in the American Revolutionary War, the British cede vast territories east of the Mississippi to the newly-independent United States, without consulting with the Native Americans who lay claim to these lands.

American Indian Wars

1785–95 The Northwest Indian War is fought between the United States and a confederation of Native American tribes, supported by the British, for control of the Northwest Territory, an area lying between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes that which was once held by the British before the American Revolutionary War. Following their defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the tribes are forced to cede extensive territory, including much of present-day Ohio, to the US by the Treaty of Greenville in 1795.

1845 New York newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan coins the phrase, "Manifest Destiny”, justifying the territorial expansion of the United States westwards into lands inhabited by Native Americans.

1876 The Great Sioux War is fought between the US Army and the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne over ownership of the Black Hills in South Dakota. During the conflict, US troops under George A. Custer are crushed by a combined Lakota-Northern Cheyenne-Arapaho forces under Sitting Bull at the Battle of Little Big Horn (Battle of the Greasy Grass).

1886 The surrender of the Apache leader Geronimo in 1886 effectively marks the end of the Apache Wars.

1890 Last major battle of the Indian Wars occurs at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, where US troops massacre a party of more than 150 Lakota men, women and children led by Spotted Elk.

Recognition and protest

1956 The Indian Relocation Act is passed. It is intended to encourage Native Americans in the United States to leave Indian reservations and assimilate into (become part of) the general American population.

1973 Wounded Knee incident on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Frustrated by their tribal leaders and the failure of federal government to enforce treaty rights, about 300 Oglala Lakota take control of Wounded Knee. They are later joined by Indian activists from around the country. After gunfire and several deaths, the occupation is called off.

1975 The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act is passed, recognizing the right of Native Americans for self-determination.

1982 Constitution Act, part of the Constitution of Canada, recognizes and affirms existing aboriginal and treaty rights in Canada, protecting the activities, practices and traditions of First Nations, Inuit and Métis (mixed indigenous and European ancestry) peoples.

2009 An "apology to Native Peoples of the United States" is issued by the US government. It states that the US "apologizes on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States."

2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests in reaction to the approved construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the northern United States. A number of Native Americans in Iowa and the Dakotas, including the Meskwaki and several Sioux tribal nations, oppose the oil pipeline, which they say will threaten sacred burial grounds as well as the quality of water in the area. The pipeline is completed and becomes operational in 2017.

Consultant: Steve Gallo