This map should be hanging in every school...

[Playinghardball]

[Fantastic Anarchist]

1. You mean it hasn't been populated by European American since time immemorial?

Oh, the humanity!

[Fantastic Anarchist]

2. I wonder if there's a better image ...

I'm trying to read all the names and even when I zoom in, everything becomes a little pixelated.

I can't identify the linguistic groups, and I'm also trying to figure out the different colored regions - does this indicate same language groups of different tribes?

This is very interesting. Thanks for posting, by the way.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. There's quite a clear one at Enc Britannica

http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-161010/North-American-Amerindian-languages

[Fantastic Anarchist]

10. You are awesome!

Thank you!

Very fascinating!

[Fantastic Anarchist]

12. Muriel ...

I was wondering if you could explain how the same language groups came about. Looking that map, it seems that in some areas, there are tiny little pockets in the same group as other more distant areas. Also, the Algonkin (Macro) seems to take a huge area, with many tribes in this region. Did they speak dialects of the same language, or is it more like different languages within same group such as Indo-European?

This is very fascinating stuff. Thanks for the link!

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. I have no idea - I just did a search for similar images

and found that one. I suspect the difference between them is more than dialect - those are long distances for pre-mechanised transport and communication, and languages do grow apart without if they're not in regular contact and exchange. It normally takes a centralised state to keep language differences to just dialect in pre-industrial conditions.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

17. I suspected as much.

Thanks for the reply.

[maindawg]

20. much better

Better to delineate the territory by linguistic similarity than tribal identification since all native Americans were nomadic. But I will definitely look into obtaining a legal rendition /copy of this map to display. Very cool.

I will just point out that its probably illegal to make your own copy for display in a public School. Copy right laws are kind of fudgy when it comes to written word but images are protected.

[D Gary Grady]

22. Not all Native Americans were nomadic

Many Native American nations were indeed nomadic, but my understanding (I'm no expert) is taht many others were not, the Maya and Aztecs being obvious major examples. Of those inhabiting what is now the United States, non-nomadic nations include the Chinook and the Hopi and some groups of Navajo and Cherokee, not to mention earlier groups such as the Anasazi (possibly ancestors of the Hopi). Many of these, I think, relied on agriculture (not really compatible with a nomadic life) and some developed sophisticated methods of irrigation. Here in North Carolina there were permanent settlements complete with small earthwork pyramids ("mounds&quot like those in Mesoamerica, and in the central U.S., for example, near St Louis, there were huge earthen pyramids suggestive of cultures at least partly non-nomadic.

[el_bryanto]

27. That does point to something else we tend to forget - they weren't static

There were societal improvements and innovations for as long as they were around, societies evolved, grew, and fell apart - just like in Europe.

We tend to imagine them just standing around and waiting for us to show up.

Bryant

[truebluegreen]

28. I highly recommend the book, "1491"--an excellent, surprising read.

Can't remember the author (my big fat copy sorta disintegrated after getting passed around) but I currently have the sequel "1493" on order and can hardly wait.

[brer cat]

29. Charles Mann.

[truebluegreen]

30. Ah! Thank you!

Just had a little brain fade.

[geckosfeet]

3. Interesting history. My guess is that most folks have never heard of most of those peoples.

They probably could'nt find Syria or Russia on a map either.

[Blue_Tires]

4. What the hell kind of map is that?

Are those all summer camps?

Or are they all ski resorts?

[K.O. Stradivarius]

13. Gambling casinos and places to score tax free cigarettes.

[SheilaT]

5. Peoples are always moving around.

Any map is just a snapshot of a particular time and place.

So what specific year is this valid for?

[progressoid]

8. Right. This one shows Pre-contact distribution of North American language families north of Mexico

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_schemes_for_indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas

[laundry_queen]

16. This one makes more sense to me

than the 2 previous ones posted. I was wondering where the Dene was. I lived in areas with Dene and it covers a large area.

[Coyotl]

7. Or one that isn't a gros simplification!

[progressoid]

9. I don't think these people agree...

------------- you never see my tribe on these maps even though we had a good chunk of land lol

---------- This map is all messed up. There are so many problems with it, I don’t even know where to start.

-------- Bad map. BAD MAP!

----- So many Eskimoes.

this map is awful. it’s so fucking inaccurate and offensive.

when will cartographers (and map-readers) learn to be fucking accountable tho. like it’s just irresponsible and essentially automatically shoddy work to try to map all tribal territories in N. America on the same map, because at that scale, it’s physically impossible to represent everyone. a few months ago I was hired to make maps of historical changes in indigenous territories in eastern Guatemala (a relatively small area), and ended up having to draw maps that were 1” to 20km, and even then, it was still a logistical challenge. lol this map doesn’t even have a date on it, much less sources…again: as someone who makes a living mapping stuff like this, I can tell you: it took over 6 months to dig through archives and indigenous records just to find adequate and reliable information for less than half of Guatemala, a tiny tiny fraction of N. America.

there’s a lot at stake in mapping indigenous territories and cultural/linguistic areas, and unfortunately, usually those with the power and authority to map things like that are (a) not indigenous (b) not invested in indigenous communities (c) not knowledgeable enough on indigenous cultures and complexity therein to draw an adequate representation.

FELLOW CARTOGRAPHERS AND ACADEMICS: STOP FUCKING EVERYTHING UP AND HOLD YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY IN DRAWING MAPS

http://struggleisacircle.tumblr.com/post/25157295611/emeraldtriangleprincess-dolgematki

[Blue_Tires]

15. Yeah, I was going to ask about that

since it didn't resemble any of the maps I'd ever seen in school...I was at least curious to know the year or era(s) that map portrays, but now I know it's just an amateurish hack job....

[Bucky]

19. I don't like how they're so hateful against Eskimos

I loathe that kind of below-the-radar racism

[Nevernose]

26. I thought it was language groups

And not tribes.

[Glassunion]

11. We had one similar hanging in my middle school social sciences classroom.

It looked a bit different (way more detail).

This was in the deep south.

[Bucky]

18. I really dislike being called a European American

I'm an American. Stuff happened in the past, much of it terrible, atrocious, and unfair. We should study this, all of it. Hell, I teach this stuff for a living. But to look at me, objectively, and conclude the most significant thing about my Americanness is that some ancestors of mine, 6 or 7 generations back, came from Europe is to miss the main context of who I am where I am and to distort some other part of me that has no bearing on how I act, think, and live.

I've got nothing personal against Europeans, by the way. I've had a number of them as friends over the years. But culturally speaking they are very different from me.

[maindawg]

21. I guess we are stuck with it.

As we use the term 'African American' to identify people of color. How else can we label ourselves? I mean ,I agree with you and in a few more generations none of it will be necessary since all Americans will kind of become similar. Only then will we be able to fully shed the tags and simply be Americans.

[toby jo]

23. earthlings.

[Bucky]

25. No, I'm not. It's not how I identify.

I disagree that there won't be significant ethnic differences in the US. The "melting pot" was always a fallacy. I predict instead that new ethnicities will emerge over the next 200 years, or that things we don't think of as ethnicity will come to be thought of as such. I'm just saying that "European-American" doesn't define me any more than "Siberian-American" describes my friend who is an Osage Indian. If others choose to buy into a label like "African-American" or "European-American" I can accept that. But it just ain't me.

I will argue that "Asian-American" is pretty damn useless as a denominative however. For instance...

African ==>
European ==>
Asian ==>

Racial categories don't really exist, not according to biologists. The ones we think exist have only been created to make us believe things that aren't true. I choose not to be fooled.

[Spider Jerusalem]

31. Except those people are, respectively, European, African and Middle Eastern

which has more to do with their distant ancestry than where they were born. Ethnic classification is in part about ancestral origins and immigrant vs indigenous populations.

And recent advances in population genetics are such that population-specific genetic markers can pretty accurately identify the ancestral origins of a given person--see for instance a study which found that subjects' self-reported ancestral origins were a good predictor of clustering of DNA markers among distinct population subgroups.

Two arguments against racial categorization as defined above are firstly that race has no biological basis [1,3], and secondly that there are racial differences but they are merely cosmetic, reflecting superficial characteristics such as skin color and facial features that involve a very small number of genetic loci that were selected historically; these superficial differences do not reflect any additional genetic distinctiveness [2]. A response to the first of these points depends on the definition of 'biological'. If biological is defined as genetic then, as detailed above, a decade or more of population genetics research has documented genetic, and therefore biological, differentiation among the races. This conclusion was most recently reinforced by the analysis of Wilson et al. [2]. If biological is defined by susceptibility to, and natural history of, a chronic disease, then again numerous studies over past decades have documented biological differences among the races. In this context, it is difficult to imagine that such differences are not meaningful. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a definition of 'biological' that does not lead to racial differentiation, except perhaps one as extreme as speciation.

A forceful presentation of the second point - that racial differences are merely cosmetic - was given recently in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine [1]: "Such research mistakenly assumes an inherent biological difference between black-skinned and white-skinned people. It falls into error by attributing a complex physiological or clinical phenomenon to arbitrary aspects of external appearance. It is implausible that the few genes that account for such outward characteristics could be meaningfully linked to multigenic diseases such as diabetes mellitus or to the intricacies of the therapeutic effect of a drug." The logical flaw in this argument is the assumption that the blacks and whites in the referenced study differ only in skin pigment. Racial categorizations have never been based on skin pigment, but on indigenous continent of origin. For example, none of the population genetic studies cited above, including the study of Wilson et al. [2], used skin pigment of the study subjects, or genetic loci related to skin pigment, as predictive variables. Yet the various racial groups were easily distinguishable on the basis of even a modest number of random genetic markers; furthermore, categorization is extremely resistant to variation according to the type of markers used (for example, RFLPs, microsatellites or SNPs).

Genetic differentiation among the races has also led to some variation in pigmentation across races, but considerable variation within races remains, and there is substantial overlap for this feature. For example, it would be difficult to distinguish most Caucasians and Asians on the basis of skin pigment alone, yet they are easily distinguished by genetic markers. The author of the above statement [1] is in error to assume that the only genetic differences between races, which may differ on average in pigmentation, are for the genes that determine pigmentation.
Common versus rare alleles

Despite the evidence for genetic differentiation among the five major races, as defined above, numerous studies have shown that local populations retain a great deal of genetic variation. Analysis of variance has led to estimates of 10% for the proportion of variance due to average differences between races, and 75% of the variance due to genetic variation within populations. Comparable estimates have been obtained for classical blood markers [15,16], microsatellites [17], and SNPs [12]. Unfortunately, these analysis of variance estimates have also led to misunderstandings or misinterpretations. Because of the large amount of variation observed within races versus between races, some commentators have denied genetic differentiation between the races; for example, "Genetic data ... show that any two individuals within a particular population are as different genetically as any two people selected from any two populations in the world." [18]. This assertion is both counter-intuitive and factually incorrect [12,13]. If it were true, it would be impossible to create discrete clusters of humans (that end up corresponding to the major races), for example as was done by Wilson et al. [2], with even as few as 20 randomly chosen genetic markers. Two Caucasians are more similar to each other genetically than a Caucasian and an Asian.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC139378/

[cynatnite]

24. We had similar maps in our history books...

Both my daughters studied maps such as these also. Not sure about my son though. I haven't asked him.

It's out there...perhaps not as common as you'd like.