Question: The date of the start of the history of the United States is a subject of debate among historians, in recent decades American schools and universities typically have shifted back in time to include more on the colonial period and much more on the prehistory of the Native Americans, the history of Native Americans in the United States began in ancient times tens of thousands of years ago with the settlement of the Americas by who?

Context articles: Major Crimes Act
Indian removal
Native American civil rights
History of the United States
History of Native Americans in the United States
Alcohol and Native Americans
Indigenous languages of Arizona
Shelter Rock (North Hills, New York)
Native American mascot laws and regulations
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

The Major Crimes Act (U.S. Statutes at Large, 23:385) is a law passed by the United States Congress in 1885 as the final section of the Indian Appropriations Act of that year.
 The law places certain crimes under federal jurisdiction if they are committed by a Native American in Native territory.
 The law follows the 1817 General Crimes Act, which extended federal jurisdiction to crimes committed in Native territory but did not cover crimes committed by Native Americans against Native Americans.
 The Major Crime Act therefore broadened federal jurisdiction in Native territory by extending it to some crimes committed by Native Americans against Native Americans.
 The Major Crimes Act was passed by Congress in response to the Supreme Court of the United States's ruling in "Ex parte Crow Dog" (109 U.S. 556 (1883)) that overturned the federal court conviction of Brule Lakota sub-chief Crow Dog for the murder of principal chief Spotted Tail on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
Indian removal was a policy of the United States government in the 19th century whereby Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River, thereafter known as Indian Territory.
 In a matter that remains one of debate by scholars, description of the policy—which clearly contributed to devastation in numbers, freedom and prosperity for those displaced—is sometimes elevated to being one of long-term genocide of Native Americans, in any case, a consequence of actions first by European settlers to North America in the colonial period, then by the United States government and its citizens until the mid-20th century.
 The policy traced its direct origins to the administration of James Monroe, though it addressed conflicts between European Americans and Native Americans that had been occurring since the 17th century, and were escalating into the early 19th century as white settlers were continually pushing westward.
 The Indian Removal Act was the key law that forced the removal of the Indians, and was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830.
Native American civil rights are the civil rights of Native Americans in the United States.
 Because Native Americans are citizens of their tribal nations as well as the United States, and those tribal nations are characterized under U.S. law as "domestic dependent nations", a special relationship that creates a particular tension between rights retained via tribal sovereignty and rights that individual Natives obtained as U.S. citizens.
 This status creates tension today, but was far more extreme before Native people were uniformly granted U.S. citizenship in 1924.
 Assorted laws and policies of the United States government, some tracing to the pre-Revolutionary colonial period, denied basic human rights—particularly in the areas of cultural expression and travel—to indigenous people.
The date of the start of the history of the United States is a subject of debate among historians.
 Older textbooks start with the arrival of Christopher Columbus on October 12, 1492 and emphasize the European background of the colonization of the Americas, or they start around 1600 and emphasize the American frontier.
 In recent decades American schools and universities typically have shifted back in time to include more on the colonial period and much more on the prehistory of the Native Americans.
The history of Native Americans in the United States began in ancient times tens of thousands of years ago with the settlement of the Americas by the Paleo-Indians.
 Anthropologists and archeologists have identified and studied a wide variety of cultures that existed during this era.
 Their subsequent contact with Europeans had a profound impact on their history.
Native Americans in the United States have historically had extreme difficulty with the use of alcohol.
 Problems continue among contemporary Native Americans; 12% of the deaths among Native Americans and Alaska Natives are alcohol-related.
 Use of alcohol varies by age, gender and tribe with women, and older women in particular, being least likely to be regular drinkers.
 Native Americans, particularly women, are more likely to abstain entirely from alcohol than the general US population.
 Frequency of use among Native Americans is generally less than the general population, but the quantity consumed when it is consumed is generally greater.
Arizona, a state in the southwestern region of the United States of America, is known for its high population of Native Americans.
 Arizona has the third highest number (and the sixth highest percentage) of Native Americans of any state in the Union (See Demographics of Arizona).
 Out of the entire US population of 2.9 million Native Americans, roughly 286,680 live in Arizona, representing 10% of the country's total Native American population.
 Only California and Oklahoma have more Native Americans than Arizona by number.
 Arizona also has the highest proportion of land allocated to Native American reservations, at 28%.
 Arizona has five of the twelve largest Indian reservations in the United States, including the largest, the Navajo Nation, and the third-largest, the Tohono O'odham Nation.
 Also, Arizona has the largest number of Native American language speakers in the United States.
Shelter Rock is a rock shelter of granite on the border of Manhasset and North Hills, New York, USA, 10 feet (3m) from Shelter Rock Road.
 The rock is a glacial erratic estimated to weigh 1,800 tons and has a 30-foot overhang.
 It is 55 feet high and 35 feet wide.
 It was deposited by glacial action between 20,000 and 11,000 years ago.
 Members of the Matinecock had a settlement nearby and a number of legends about the rock arose among both the Native Americans and the European colonists.
 Native Americans used the rock as shelter from the elements, possibly as early as 1000 B.C.
The use of terms and images referring to Native Americans/First Nations as the name or mascot for a sports team is a topic of public controversy in the United States and in Canada, arising as part of the Native American/First Nations civil rights movements.
 Since the 1960s, there have been a number of protests and other actions by Native Americans and others targeting the more prominent use of such names and images by professional franchises such as the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins.
 However, the greatest change has occurred in the trend by school and college teams that have retired Native American names and mascots at an increasing rate in recent decades.
 The analysis of a database in 2013 indicates that there are currently more than 2,000 secondary schools with mascots that reference Native American culture, compared to around 3,000 fifty years ago.
 Many of these changes have been voluntary as the issue has been discussed at a local level.
 Statewide laws or school board decisions mandating change have been passed in states with significant Native American populations.
 Other states have official policies that encourage change in accordance with principles of establishing a proper environment for education.
 However, there has also been resistance and backlash.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West is a 1970 book by American writer Dee Brown that covers the history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century.
 The book expresses details of the history of American expansionism from a point of view that is critical of its effects on the Native Americans.
 Brown describes Native Americans' displacement through forced relocations and years of warfare waged by the United States federal government.
 The government's dealings are portrayed as a continuing effort to destroy the culture, religion, and way of life of Native American peoples.
 Helen Hunt Jackson's "A Century of Dishonor" is often considered a nineteenth-century precursor to Dee Brown's writing.