Native Tribes of North America Mapped
Table of Contents
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The ancestors of living Native Americans arrived in North America about 15 thousand years ago. As a result, a wide diversity of communities, societies, and cultures finally developed on the continent over the millennia.
The population figure for Indigenous peoples in the Americas before the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus was 70 million or more.
About 562 tribes inhabited the contiguous U.S. territory. Ten largest North American Indian tribes: Arikara, Cherokee, Iroquois, Pawnee, Sioux, Apache, Eskimo, Comanche, Choctaw, Cree, Ojibwa, Mohawk, Cheyenne, Navajo, Seminole, Hope, Shoshone, Mohican, Shawnee, Mi’kmaq, Paiute, Wampanoag, Ho-Chunk, Chumash, Haida.
Below is the tribal map of Pre-European North America.
Native Tribes of North America
The old map below gives a Native American perspective by placing the tribes in full flower ~ the “Glory Days.” It is pre-contact from across the eastern sea or, at least, before that contact seriously affected change. Stretching over 400 years, the time of contact was quite different from tribe to tribe. For instance, the “Glory Days” of the Maya and Aztec came to an end very long before the interior tribes of other areas, with some still resisting almost until the 20th Century.
At one time, numbering in the millions, the native peoples spoke close to 4,000 languages.
The Americas’ European conquest, which began in 1492, ended in a sharp drop in the Native American population through epidemics, hostilities, ethnic cleansing, and slavery.
When the United States was founded, established Native American tribes were viewed as semi-independent nations, as they commonly lived in communities separate from white immigrants. The map below shows native lands officially recognized as unceded in the continental United States.
The map below shows the invasion of America. Between 1776 and 1887, the United States seized over 1.5 billion acres from America’s indigenous people by treaty and executive order.
Today, over 5 million Native Americans in the U.S., 78 percent of whom live outside reservations.
Percentage of Indigenous peoples in North America per state and province
To read more about the subject of native tribes of North America, consider the following books on Amazon:
- Encyclopedia of Native Tribes of North America
- Native American History: A Captivating Guide to the Long History of Native Americans Including Stories of the Wounded Knee Massacre, Native American Tribes, Hiawatha and More
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Candice?
interesting
Why can’t I open the map images to zoom in to particular regions? I hoped this would be more useful.
If you right click on the top map and then your icon will be a + symbol. click and it will zoom in, you can then move around using the side and bottom control bars. You will then be able to see all the names.
What about the Nisgaa? I’m not up on my indigenous tribes by any means but I am aware of the Nisgaa and I can’t find them on this map -makes wonder who else is missing?
There are thousands of tribes missing. They have only entered the biggest tribes.In my area, they have only mentioned Salish but I know of at least 5 other tribes.
i recommend the promised neverland and bleach
wow
wrong
You can’t call us Indians. We are native Americans or indigenous people, but we are not Indian.
That is correct. what is and “Indian?”
WOW!
Native Americans were brutally treated and I do not feel they should have been put on reservations. This was their land in the first place. The people that England put out were dangerous criminals and had communicable diseases and they invaded a pure land and took over. Then had the nerve to have the Native Americans go to reservations. Despicable!
This is one-dimensional, one sided thinking, Stephanie. I would hope you are smarter than that. Is this the CRT indoctrination?
As with any story, there are more than 7sides to any tale, especially in history. The Indians in the early Americas were as tribal and bloody and migratory as any other groups of people on any of the other continents around the world. The Indians were territorial, like most predators, but they did not “own” property, as we understand it. Most were nomadic, following the seasons and the herds they needed for their survival. Nor were they pure. Like most tribes, when they ran short of enough men, women or children to sustain the tribe, they raided other tribes and took what they needed as slaves, wives, and offspring until the captives were either killed, died or absorbed into the tribe as family.
As for the Europeans’ explorations around the world, the first were explorers and soldiers. Those who followed as “settlers” were mostly debtors or political and religious agitators who were sold to Investment Bankers, by the king. They were labor, wasting away in prison, for failure to perform. They were people who were offered the chance to “settle” in “the new world” as an alternative to a European prison for their unpaid debts or for their disruptive political activities at home. They were “selected” because they were communal by nature, clustered together for protection, and labored for their living. All traits needed if the bankers’ investments were to ever see their settlements settled, and get a return on their investment. These people were not the itinerant thugs you make them out to be. Thugs and criminals don’t work for a living. Lumber, mining and farming are trades for the strong of limb as well as the soul. Not the criminally weak of mind or spirit.
As for diseases, they flowed in both directions. The mortality rates among the early settlers was more than 95%. Early settlements were re-populated three, four, five times and more before the settlement populations finally became self-sustaining. This was due more to disease and poor nutrition rather than to any injury in agriculture or battle. Nor was this mortality rate unique to just the Americas. It was a way of life that all the explorers and migratory population movements find throughout their histories. One of the reasons you don’t hear a lot about diseases among the Indian tribes is because most of their histories are oral, not written down. How did the Dineh, the Anasazi disappear so completely? Tales abound. Nothing written down. Strange new lands all had their own foods, plants, waters and livestock that proved harmful to the newcomers. All ecologies are different, country to country, state to state. This is true throughout all the continents, including Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia as well as both of the Americas. Even today. That is why, when you prepare to travel, that you are required to get shots to “Immunize” yourself to the “local” diseases before you can get permission to leave. And even then, “Montezuma’s Revenge” is still a traveler’s nightmare.
As for putting Indians on reservations, in the beginning, it was the Indians who kept the settlers on reservations while they preserved their own hunting and fishing grounds. Putting Indians on reservations were “political Solutions” that weren’t made until the mid to late 1800s by politicians in the US, not by the early settlers. And they were not always adhered to. They were made more for keeping people out than for keeping the Indians in. The Indians prefer their privacy. Again, nothing new here, Reservations, ghettos, etc., are always with us. They just have different names. It could be said that the early settlers were confined to reservations, too, called Plymouth, Jamestown, the Carolinas, Savannah, Abaco, St Augustine, etc. The settlers were accountable to their local governors for their production output and their livelihood. They were not free to travel. These reservations, called settlements, were made by the Spanish in the South and the Caribbean, by the French in the North (NY to Canada and to the Far West), and the Dutch in NY, etc.
The point is, Stephanie, in spite of your slightly jaded tale of woe, people and populations migrate. Larger populations absorb smaller populations, and not always smoothly. And the strong dominate the weak. The US Constitution was conceived by the founders to design a methodology to address those forces of nature with a more civilized, less violent approach to self-government. They came up with a more equal solution than mob rule. As markets develop and grow in communities, the quality of life improves with it.
Sunnis and Shias have been warring for thousands of years. It is not surprising that they sneer at a “baby” country, barely 248 years old, trying to tell them how to get along together. Dictators dictate. One side wins. Rulers rule. One side wins. Negotiators negotiate. Both sides get something, not everything and never enough. It is evolution, how populations evolve, that smooths out some of the rough spots over time and addresses others as they arise. And that road is rarely a smooth one.
And that is the way of the world. You want to be a hater, a taker, a fool or a thief, you will always be dominated by the richer, stronger, wilier, meaner.
Be smart! You only have one life to live, a certain number of days available to you after you are born. Some get more days than others. Make the most of yours. You are born into a family, good bad or otherwise. Grow up, develop skills, become valuable to yourself and others, and grow a family of your own. Become part of your community. And, when the time comes, may you die in peace.
That is amazing! Thank you!