Ellie Bradley

I never got the chance to know my great-grandmother, but my mom and dad tell me I was at her funeral when I was just four years old. To her friends, husband, children, and grandchildren, Helen was just a middle-class white woman from Oklahoma. Sure, she never talked about her childhood and had never returned to her home state, but that wasn’t too strange, right? Wrong. The scope of Helen’s story widened the second my parents found discrepancies in the Oklahoma and California censuses, nearly a decade after Helen’s death. What seemed like a clerical fluke quickly became an intriguing narrative that had been lost to time. As my parents dug deeper and deeper into my great-grandmother’s past, they found more pieces of Helen’s story that unveiled who she was.

Did you know that there are 574 Native American nations within the United States? And that number only counts the ones officially recognized by the US government. Even though it can be difficult to pinpoint capitals for every native nation, we found four across the US that you won’t want to miss!

Every spring, Brigham Young University’s Native Rights Seminar takes learning beyond the classroom and onto the road. The program culminates in a five-day journey through the homelands of Native nations, where students interact with and learn from community leaders.