Native Americans, or American Indians, are the people descended from the various peoples who lived in the Americas before European colonization. Based on anthropological evidence there were three distinct migrations from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge; the second being of the Athabascan people including the ancestors of the Apache and Navajo; the third of the Inuit, the Yupik, and the Aleut.
The first wave of migration came into a land populated by the large mammals of the late Pleistocene epoch: mammoths, horses, giant sloth, wooly rhinoceros, etc. The Clovis culture is one example. Later a culture developed known as the Folsom culture based on hunting of bison.
The Athabascan peoples, late migrants, are generally found in Alaska and western Canada but several tribes migrated south as far as, California and the American Southwest.
In the Mississippi valley of the United States, in Central America and in the Andes of South America Native American civilizations arose with farming cultures and city states.
Tribes
- Aleut
- Apache
- Arapahoe
- Blackfoot
- Caddo
- Cherokee
- Cheyenne
- Choctaw
- Commanche
- Coushatta
- Cree
- Delaware
- Havasupai
- Hopi
- Iroquois
- Kickapoo
- Kiowa
- Lakota (Sioux)
- Mohican
- Muckleshoot
- Navajo
- Nez Perce
- Sauk or Sac
- Seminole
- Tlingit
- Ute
Languages
What is the best name for this group of people?
Anthropologists originated the term, and prefer it to the former apellations of "Indian" or "American Indian", which they consider inaccurate, as these terms bear no relationship to the actual origins of aboriginal Americans, and were born of the misapprehension on the part of Christopher Columbus, arriving at islands off the east coast of the North American continent, that he had reached the Indies. Of course, "Indian" and "American Indian" continue to be widely used in North America, even by Native Americans themselves, many of whom are not offended by the terms.
One minority view has been that a more accurate term might be "Asiatic Americans" because of the popular theory that such peoples migrated to the Americas from Asia accross an ice bridge covering the Bering Straits some 20,000 years ago. There is competent fossil evidence that this may have been the case. The strong tradition among archaeologists and anthropologists, however, is to indicate the geographic origins of a people as relating to the region where they (or their remains) were first encountered by researchers.
One difficulty with the term, however, as a substitute for "American Indian," is that there are at least two peoples who certainly are natives of the Americas, but who are not properly considered American Indians: the Inuit and the Aleut people of the far north of the continent. Another difficulty is that many Native American groups migrated to their current locations after the start of European colonization, and therefore it can be argued that they are no more native to their current locations than the Europeans.
In Canada the term "First Nations" is now in general use. In Alaska, because of legal use (in ANSCA) and because of the Eskimo peoples, the term "Alaskan Native]] is used.
External Resources:
www.nativeweb.org/resources/
Further Reading
- Arlene B. Hirschfelder, Mary Gloyne Byler, and Michael Dorris, Guide to research on North American Indians, American Library Association, 1983, ISBN: 0838903533