Eras
Follow change through time—without forcing every place onto the same timeline.
These chapters move from Indigenous histories before European colonization to colonial encounters. They are a way to organize questions, not boundaries around peoples or cultures.
Chapter 01 / Before European colonization—and continuing today
Indigenous histories
North America was never an empty landscape waiting for cities.
Distinct Indigenous societies shaped the continent through farming, fishing, trade, diplomacy and construction. Some built large urban centers; others organized life around villages, seasonal movement or networks linking many kinds of settlement.
Many ways of making a place
In the Valley of Mexico, Tenochtitlan connected monumental buildings and residential districts with canals, causeways and productive agricultural landscapes. Along the St. Lawrence, Iroquoian communities cultivated crops and lived in villages. In the Hudson estuary, Lenape communities used rich coastal and river environments within wider networks of exchange.
Connections beyond the settlement
Waterways carried people, goods and knowledge. Political relationships and responsibilities to land helped shape where people lived and how they connected with neighboring communities. These relationships cannot be reduced to the borders of modern countries.
Continuity, not disappearance
European colonization transformed these worlds through violence, epidemics, imposed rule and displacement. Indigenous peoples nevertheless maintained and renewed communities, languages and political life. Learning an earlier history should also mean recognizing the people who carry it forward.
Further reading: INAH’s Templo Mayor Museum; Pointe-à-Callière’s work on the Montreal region; the National Museum of the American Indian’s Native New York exhibition.
Chapter 02 / Different beginnings, uneven transformations
Colonial encounters
Colonial cities grew through exchange and alliance, but also through conquest, forced labor and dispossession.
European powers did not arrive everywhere at once or establish identical systems. Indigenous nations pursued their own interests through diplomacy, trade and resistance, even as colonial expansion threatened their lands and sovereignty.
1521 / Tenochtitlan and Spanish rule
The fall of Tenochtitlan made way for a Spanish colonial capital. Colonial authorities reshaped landholding, religious institutions and labor. Indigenous communities remained central to the city’s work and daily life, while navigating coercion and defending rights within a new political order.
1642 / Ville-Marie on the St. Lawrence
The French settlement that became Montreal joined a region already connected by Indigenous travel and exchange. Missions and the fur trade depended on relationships with Indigenous nations. Diplomacy and warfare shaped the city’s development; British conquest in 1760 introduced another colonial regime.
1620s–1664 / From New Amsterdam to New York
Dutch colonization created a trading port in Lenape homelands. Enslaved Africans helped build and sustain the settlement. Conflict and expanding colonial claims displaced Indigenous communities. English control from 1664 changed the city’s name and government while slavery and colonial expansion continued.
These dates describe turning points in particular cities—not a single beginning or ending for colonialism across North America.
Further reading: INAH; Pointe-à-Callière; The Canadian Encyclopedia; New Netherland Institute; National Museum of the American Indian.
Reading the past
A city holds more than one history.
Indigenous peoples are living communities, not a chapter that ended with European arrival. Their histories continue through language, governance, relationships to land and urban life.
Dates mark particular events, not clean breaks. Colonial rule began and changed at different times across North America, and its consequences remain part of the present.
Read written records alongside archaeology, oral histories and knowledge shared by the communities concerned. Ask who created a source, whose perspective it preserves and whose experience may be missing.
Keep exploring the evidence
Useful starting points include Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Pointe-à-Callière in Montreal, the National Museum of the American Indian and the New Netherland Institute. Seek out Indigenous-led sources alongside museum and archival collections.
The photographs on this site show contemporary places. They are illustrations, not evidence of how those places looked in earlier centuries.