Explore All Resources
Take part in our learning community by exploring our wide array of resources. From compelling curriculum, to easy-to-apply teaching strategies, and engaging professional development events, we offer everything you need to transform the classroom experience.
Facing History’s unique approach combines adaptable teaching materials, professional learning, and ongoing support to equip teachers with the tools and practices they need to help students fully engage in their learning. Our continuously growing collection of resources are designed to promote academic rigor, social-emotional learning, and create connections between the complexities of history and today.
Get Full Access to Facing History’s Resources
If you don’t have an account, you can sign up – it’s fast, easy, and free – to get full access to our dynamic library of free content and materials.
They Fence Their Neighbors Away (en español)
In Spanish, Sioux chief Sitting Bull responds to different visions of land ownership in this speech excerpt.
Platform of the Workingmen’s Party of California (en español)
In Spanish, the political platform of the Workingmen's Party of California, a third party organized around eliminating competition for white laborers in the West and advocating for a ban on Chinese immigration.
Chinese Immigrants Write to President Grant (en español)
In Spanish, Chinese leaders in California write to President Ulysses S. Grant in 1876 about the discrimination their communities face from a rising anti-Chinese movement.
Dispossession, Destruction, and the Reserves
Reserves existed in Africa, in the British American colonies, and in Canada, where the colonizers had to address the people they dispossessed— people who seemingly stood in the way of the political and economic plans of European settlers.
Defining the Indian
Two main pieces of legislation laid the foundation for what was to be the new Dominion’s policy regarding relations with First Nations: the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869.
Student Journal: Choices in Little Rock (Spanish)
This digital journal, available in Google Slides, gives students a place to record their responses to the unit's journal prompts.
Banning Indigenous Culture
The ultimate goal of the Indian Act has always been the assimilation of the Indigenous Peoples as separate nations into mainstream Canada.
Traditional Education
The idea that Western culture was superior and that the Indigenous Peoples needed to be Christianized and civilized came from the biases of Europeans and their unwillingness to appreciate the complex, largely unwritten teaching processes inside indigenous communities.
Aggressive Assimilation
The key to this policy was a system of industrial schools where religious instruction and skills training would help the Native Americans catch up with the demands of Western society.
Legislation for the Residential Schools
Prime Minister Macdonald authorized the creation of new residential schools and granted government funds for those that were already in place.
The Role of the Churches
Learn about the Catholic and Anglican churches' role in propagating residential schools throughout Canada.
Building the Indian Residential Schools System
One of the most important historians of the residential schools, James R. Miller, estimates that a great number of indigenous students were, in fact, educated in day schools, although the residential schools left the most painful, long-lasting marks on indigenous communities.