50 Fun Facts About Native American Tribes

Which tribe's reservation, the largest in the United States, covers more land than the state of West Virginia?

Navajo land spans about 27,000 square miles across three states, and the door of a traditional hogan there faces east to greet the dawn.

Which tribe sent about $170 to famine victims in Ireland in 1847, a gift honoured by a sculpture in County Cork?

Choctaw donors had only recently endured their own forced removal west. The stainless steel sculpture Kindred Spirits was unveiled in their honour in Midleton in 2017.

Which tribe, forced west on the Trail of Tears, made Tahlequah, Oklahoma, its capital in 1839?

Cherokee citizens still gather in Tahlequah every Labor Day weekend for a national holiday that marks the signing of the nation's constitution in 1839.

Which confederacy of six nations has issued its own passports since 1923, carried by its national lacrosse team?

Iroquois passports began when the Cayuga statesman Deskaheh needed one to take his people's case to the League of Nations in Geneva.

Which Florida tribe says it is the only one in America never to have signed a peace treaty with the US?

Seminole survivors, perhaps 200 of them, retreated deep into the Everglades after an 1850s war and were left alone without ever surrendering.

Which US state alone is home to 229 federally recognized tribes, about two in five of the national total?

Alaska settled Native land claims in 1971 by handing titles to twelve regional corporations and more than 200 village corporations.

Which older name for Wisconsin's Ho-Chunk people is shared with a famous American brand of motorhome?

Winnebago came from a Potawatomi term for the people. The motorhome maker took it from the county where the company was founded in 1958.

Which Columbia River people gave their name to a trade jargon and to the US Army's CH-47 transport helicopter?

Chinook Jargon grew from a pidgin that speakers of many languages used for trade along the coast, and the helicopter took the name in 1962.

Sacagawea helped Lewis and Clark trade for horses in 1805 with which tribe, whose chief proved to be her brother?

Shoshone chief Cameahwait was recognised by Sacagawea as she interpreted, though the Shoshoni language uses one word for both brother and cousin.

Which people, portrayed as dying out in an 1826 James Fenimore Cooper novel, survive today as a Wisconsin nation?

Mohican families moved from the Hudson Valley to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and then west, and are enrolled today in the Stockbridge-Munsee Community.

Which Great Plains nation, divided into Dakota and Lakota peoples, is collectively known as the Seven Council Fires?

Sioux bands were exiled from Minnesota after the war of 1862, which broke out when treaty payments and rations failed to arrive on time.

Which tribe's village deep in the Grand Canyon is the only place in the US where mail still arrives by mule?

Havasupai means 'people of the blue-green water', after the stream whose waterfalls draw thousands of visitors to a village reached only on foot, by mule or by helicopter.

Chiricahua, Mescalero and Jicarilla are major divisions of which Southwestern people, whose leaders included Cochise?

Apache prisoners from the Chiricahua bands were exiled by train to Florida in 1886, then moved to Alabama and on to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, before they were freed.

Which tribe's mesa-top village of Oraibi, Arizona, has been lived in continuously since around the year 1100?

Hopi leaders settled a 1906 dispute over outside influence with a bloodless contest, and the losing traditionalists left Oraibi to found the village of Hotevilla.

Which Plains nation of famed horse riders was led by Quanah Parker, the son of the captive Cynthia Ann Parker?

Comanche riders ruled a homeland known as Comancheria, and Quanah Parker led his band onto the reservation at Fort Sill only once the bison were nearly gone.

Which tribe of the inland Northwest developed the spotted Appaloosa breed and followed Chief Joseph in the war of 1877?

Nez Perce breeders lost most of their horses after the 1877 war, and the Appaloosa declined for several decades before it was revived.

Pocahontas was a daughter of the leader of which alliance of about thirty Tidewater Virginia peoples?

Powhatan was also the name the English gave her father, Wahunsenacawh. She was no princess in her own culture, but the London Company presented her as one.

Which people, federally recognized today at Mashpee and on Martha's Vineyard, taught the Pilgrims to grow corn?

Wampanoag activists have been reviving their language since a reclamation project began in 1993, and Mashpee High School started teaching it in 2018.

Which Plains dwelling with adjustable smoke flaps takes its English name from the Dakota and Lakota languages?

Tipi poles ran 12 to 25 feet long and were called lodge poles in English, which is where the lodgepole pine got its name.

Which Sac and Fox athlete, Olympic champion in 1912, did the Associated Press rank the half-century's greatest?

Jim Thorpe went on to play professional football and entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of its inaugural class in 1963.

The feared Dog Soldiers, defeated at Summit Springs in 1869, were a military society of which Plains tribe?

Cheyenne Dog Soldiers came to operate as a band of their own, and many of them, including the leader Tall Bull, were half Lakota.

Which tribe's Montana reservation holds the Little Bighorn battlefield, where its men had served as Custer's scouts?

Crow men enlisted as Army scouts in April 1876 because the Lakota, their traditional enemies, were camped in old Crow country and raiding their camps.

Which tribe's Montana reservation lies just east of Glacier National Park and borders the Canadian province of Alberta?

Blackfeet members mostly belong to the Piegan band of a confederacy that spans the border, and they hold the Badger-Two Medicine area south of the park sacred.

Which Connecticut tribe opened Foxwoods as a bingo hall in 1986 and grew it into a giant casino resort?

Pequot numbers on the reservation had fallen so low that, when Elizabeth George died in 1973, the government planned to reclaim the land. Her grandson led the fight to keep it.

Which people of the Alexander Archipelago are divided into Raven and Eagle moieties and weave Chilkat robes?

Tlingit weavers of the Chilkat River gave the robes their name, and a single robe of mountain goat wool and cedar bark can take a year to finish.

Tecumseh, who built a pan-tribal alliance and founded Prophetstown with his brother in 1808, belonged to which tribe?

Shawnee resistance suffered when William Henry Harrison destroyed Prophetstown in 1811 while Tecumseh was away in the South recruiting allies.

Which Great Lakes people, more often called Chippewa in the United States, long mined and traded copper?

Ojibwe and Chippewa are two renderings of the same word, and the people are also known for tapping maple trees for syrup.

Which Arctic people make up over four in five residents of Nunavut, the Canadian territory created in 1999?

Inuit negotiators won the territory through a land claims agreement that split it from the Northwest Territories to give them self-government.

Which people, whose biggest band is Lac La Ronge in Saskatchewan, form the largest group of First Nations in Canada?

Cree traders, along with the Assiniboine, were key go-betweens in the trading networks of the northern plains.

Andrew Jackson defeated the Red Stick faction of which Southeastern nation at Horseshoe Bend in March 1814?

Creek traditionalists took the Red Stick name from their war clubs, about two feet long with red-painted wooden handles.

Which open-sided house of palmetto thatch on a cypress frame was built for life in the Florida Everglades?

Chickee builders had lived in log cabins until the wars of 1835 to 1858, when US troops pushed them ever deeper into the swamps.

Which Plains ceremony, in which pierced participants may be tethered to a central pole, did Canada prohibit until 1951?

Sun Dance ceremonies were prohibited alongside the potlatch, and in the United States a 1978 act of Congress finally protected such religious rites.

Which A-frame of two lashed poles did Plains peoples use to drag loads behind dogs and, later, horses?

Travois loads were small before horses arrived, because a dog could pull no more than 20 to 30 kilograms and tired quickly in hot weather.

Which food, born of government rations of flour, sugar and lard, was named South Dakota's official state bread in 2005?

Frybread is eaten plain or with toppings from honey to venison, and it became a symbol of resilience because cooks developed it out of necessity.

Which grain, known as manoomin, is harvested by bending ripe heads over a canoe and tapping them with sticks?

Wild rice plants need only a gentle brushing to release the ripe grain, and the size of the sticks, called knockers, is laid down in state and tribal law.

Which gemstone did Native Americans mine with stone tools at Cerrillos, New Mexico, long before Europeans arrived?

Turquoise made New Mexico the country's largest producer before the 1920s, and Cerrillos is thought to be the site of the oldest mines in the United States.

Which Midwestern state is named after a tribe that calls itself the Báxoje, a name translated as 'grey snow'?

Iowa takes its name from a people who once lived there and are now enrolled in two tribes, one in Kansas and Nebraska and the other in Oklahoma.

Which of the Great Lakes is named for a people the French called the Cat Nation, dispersed in the 1650s?

Erie people were said to speak the same language as the Hurons, and their 'cat' may have been the eastern panther or even the raccoon.

Which California resort city has the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians as its largest collective landowner?

Palm Springs grew up on a reservation laid out as a checkerboard, with tribal squares set between non-tribal ones, and the band also owns the nearby Indian Canyons.

Which dry culture region between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada is the homeland of the Paiute and Goshute?

Great Basin tribes met outsiders comparatively late, and the region stayed largely free of non-Native settlers until the first Mormons arrived in 1847.

John Herrington, the first enrolled citizen of a Native American tribe to fly in space, carried which nation's flag?

Chickasaw Nation Governor Bill Anoatubby presented the flag that Herrington, born in Wetumka, Oklahoma, took on his thirteen-day spaceflight in 2002.

Lewis and Clark named their 1804–05 winter fort after which earth-lodge people of the upper Missouri River?

Mandan hospitality drew the expedition to winter beside the villages, but a smallpox epidemic in 1836–37 cut the people from more than 1,600 to an estimated 125.

Which New Mexico pueblo people speak a language isolate with no known relatives and make fetishes for ritual and trade?

Zuni warriors, 600 strong, met Coronado near Hawikuh in 1540, after a friar had claimed the village was one of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola.

Which New Mexico pueblo of multi-storied reddish adobe became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992?

Taos won back its sacred Blue Lake in 1970, when President Nixon signed the return of mountain land taken for a national forest decades earlier.

Which language family includes Arapaho, Menominee, Potawatomi and the Mi'kmaq tongue of Atlantic Canada?

Algonquian languages were among the first that Europeans met in North America, which is why the family has given so many words to English.

Which nation's Polly Cooper helped carry corn 250 miles to Washington's hungry army at Valley Forge in 1778?

Oneida tradition holds that Cooper refused any payment, calling it her duty to help friends in need, and accepted only a black shawl.

Which tribe's chief Standing Bear won an 1879 court ruling that Native Americans are persons under the law?

Ponca chief Standing Bear argued his case in a federal court in Omaha, winning the right of habeas corpus for Native Americans for the first time.

Which tribe, led by Kintpuash or Captain Jack, held off the US Army from California's lava beds in 1872–73?

Modoc resistance came from just 52 warriors with 150 women and children, who had left the Klamath Reservation for their homeland south of Tule Lake.

Which tribe of Neah Bay, Washington, kept the right to hunt whales and seals in its 1855 treaty with the US?

Makah hunters pursued gray and humpback whales in canoes carved from whole trees, and in 1999 they caught their first whale in more than 70 years.

Which fish, once passing Celilo Falls on the Columbia River by the million, did tribes catch there with dipnets?

Salmon fishing kept Celilo among the continent's oldest continuously inhabited communities until 1957, when The Dalles Dam submerged the falls.