How we worked with series advisors on Crash Course Native American History

When we start developing a new series, we work with series advisors and subject matter experts who are experienced in the topic to help guide the series structure and content. Our series advisors on Native American History were two Indigenous women who are academics with a long history of teaching the subject at the collegiate level. Based on their guidelines around the aspects of Native culture and history we would explore in the series, we created our episode list.

Then, our three Indigenous subject matter experts expanded on the episode list with sources, examples, and additional guidelines for sensitive topics. Our script writers took all of this information, started writing the episodes, and after a lot of thoughtful work, we had a series!

A hallmark of Crash Course is the humor we weave into the educational material to keep things interesting and relatable. For Native American History, we worked with an Indigenous humor advisor who helped punch-up the scripts with Native-informed jokes. All told we worked with six Indigenous advisors during the scripting phase. Advisors were consulted at every stage of scripting, from development, to outlining, to writing, to editing.

Once the episodes were filmed, we moved into the production phase, turning the raw footage into the videos you see on our YouTube channel. The six Indigenous advisors also provided immense support during this part of the process, in addition to a seventh advisor, an Indigenous documentary filmmaker, who was consulted on the series graphics, illustrations, image selections, and any other visuals that brought the series to life.

This production advisor reviewed the styles for all the graphics, illustrations, and other design elements during the series development phase. Our GFX team was then able to use his insight to build all of the individual elements you see throughout the series—from the color scheme to the intro sequence to the character animations and beyond.

Insight from our advisors was crucial to the image selection process, especially when it came to archival images. Our advisors flagged any archival photographs that may have been taken under problematic circumstances and helped ensure that we showed a balanced mix of contemporary and archival images.

In addition to these specific ways that Indigenous advisors contributed to the series, all of our advisors were invaluable when it came to the many, many things we didn’t know that we didn’t know. They minimized our blind spots and taught us a great deal about how to cover Native American stories accurately and respectfully.

When we say Crash Course is a group project, we mean it! There's a whole team of people working hard to create videos that are informative and fun. And this is just a tiny sliver of the work that goes into creating a Crash Course series. We're proud to tell these stories, and we're so grateful for the positive feedback on the series so far! New episodes are uploaded on Tuesdays on our channel.