01/08/2026
This map should be included in every history book...
History is not there for you to like or dislike. It is there for you to learn from it. And if it offends you, even better. Because then you are less likely to repeat it. Itโs not yours for you to erase or destroy.
By the age of 10, most children in the United States have been taught all 50 states that make up the country. But centuries ago, the land that is now the United States was a very different place. Over 20 million Native Americans dispersed across over 1,000 distinct tribes, bands, and ethnic groups populated the territory.
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, Miโkmaq, Paiute, Wampanoag, Ho-Chunk, Chumash, Haida.
Below is the tribal map of Pre-European North America.
The old map below gives a Native American perspective by placing the tribes in full flower ~ the โGlory Days.โ 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 โGlory Daysโ 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 Americasโ 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.
โThe Map That Should Have Been in Every Bookโ
This map breathes
not ink on paper,
but bloodlines and voices
woven through rivers and roots.
Before borders carved the earth,
these lands had names that sang:
Navajo, Haida, Lakota,
Carib, Maya, Shawnee.
Every mountain had a memory,
every lake, a legend;
the wind itself spoke
in a thousand mother tongues.
Yet the classrooms stayed silent,
and the children learned
that discovery began with ships
not with hearts that already belonged.
If only this map hung
in every school, every home,
perhaps the world would remember
who first called this land Mother.
Let them see the colors of the tribes,
the stories drawn in smoke and soil,
and know:
the map was never lost
only hidden.
Get your poster here: (https://nativerites.com/native-american-map)
