Sunday, September 13, 2009

American Indian Tribes

Great great great map card!!!

However, this is such a vast and great subject, that getting into detials would be impossible, so ill just give you a few, regarding the names featured next to the pictures.

Blackfoot: The Blackfoot were a powerful buffalo-hunting society of the northern plains, with most of their settlements in Montana, Idaho, and Alberta. Blackfoot Indian language is one of the few indigenous languages in Canada and the United States which has a good chance for survival.

Costanoan: There were once several distinct Costanoan languages, including Mutsun, Rumsen, Karkin, and Cholon. These languages were as different from one another as the Romance languages of Europe (French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.) Language loss in California has been especially severe--the legacy of the Gold Rush days, in which massacres and Indian slavery, while technically illegal, were not actively discouraged--and none of the Costanoan languages has been spoken in more than fifty years. However, some Ohlone Indian people are working to revive their ancestral language again.

Cree: Cree history is very hard to synopsize because the Cree tribe spans such a broad territory, from the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Though their common culture and language bind them together as a people, the James Bay Cree and Woodland Cree tribes do not necessarily have any more shared history than the white people in Quebec and Alberta do. With that caveat, though, the Cree Indians as a whole have weathered European colonization better than perhaps any other group of Native Americans. Their sheer numbers and broad range helped keep them from being too decimated by European diseases to maintain stability, as happened to many smaller nations, and their particular cultural affinity for intertribal marriage (remarked upon in the oral histories of their Indian neighbors) meshed well with the intent of the French, the primary Europeans to have dealings with them. Where the English tended to try to move Indian groups further away from their civilization, the French tried to engulf them. The Cree, who had held a similar attitude towards colonization before the French ever got there, engulfed back. The result was the metis, a race of primarily French-Cree mixed-bloods, and distinct French and Cree populations who generally got along pretty well. Since Canadian nationhood, the Cree people have faced the same problems of self-determination and land control that every aboriginal group has, but they remain better-equipped to face them than most, and the Cree language is one of the few North American languages sure of surviving into the next century.

Yaqui: it is a Uto-Aztecan language of the Sonoran desert. About 350 Yaqui speakers remain in Arizona and more than 15,000 in neighboring Mexico

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