During a tour of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a guide asked the visitors to guess which country they would have thought they were in if they lived in the area in the early 1700s. After letting the visitors ponder it for a moment, he gave the answer: England.
 

One of the visitors, though, had been wondering if people living in the area at the time might have thought of themselves as Lenape, Sháwanwaki, or Onöndowága. The guide was trying to remind the visitors that the United States did not exist prior to 1776, but the visitor thought it unlikely that the many Native people living there at the time would have thought of their land or themselves as part of England. 

At a tour of the State Capitol in California, a guide explained that there were only a couple of hundred people living in Sacramento at the onset of the Gold Rush. He was trying to give a sense of how drastically the state’s population changed after 1848, but one of the visitors had a question: Did that number include indigenous people?

“Good point,” the guide replied, and no, it didn’t, else the figure would certainly be higher. John Sutter, indeed, interacted extensively with Native people when he established New Helvetia within walking distance of the Capitol building just ten years before the Gold Rush began. There were lots of Native people living in the area at the time.

These are two examples of how Native people can be excluded from narratives about who and where we are. You may be able to think of others from your own experience. It's funny to have to ask why Native people aren’t considered in some stories about American history, when everyone knows they were there. 

We should be sure everyone is included in stories at historical sites and in all walks of life, or else the stories won't make sense.