"The accomplishments of Indians and their actual place in the story of the United States have never been remotely touched by ... [most] historians. The major reason for this omission is that a substantial number of practicing historians simply do not know the source documents with sufficient precision to make sense of them; ... They spend a good deal of their time stealing footnotes and ideas from each other" (Deloria 1991, x-xi). And so a familiar, if incomplete and inaccurate, narrative persists. As an initial response to Vine Deloria's challenge, this essay offers a conceptual and historiographical prologue. One general purpose is to encourage substantive consultation across research fields, particularly among specializations within the history discipline. Such conversations are overdue. Their relative dearth has pushed specialization toward intellectual fragmentation, and it has diminished the importance and quality of historical scholarship. The history of education, among other subfields, has paid a high price for this self-imposed balkanization of knowledge. A second general purpose is to stimulate curiosity about where people have learned. This essay lays a foundation for historiographical questions concerning education within the Iroquois union, that is, the Haudenosaunee or the Five-later Six-Nations, and by extension other Indian tribes. To pursue this goal, the author entertains the hypothesis that American education began with the peoples encountered here by Europeans in the second millennium.