Native American Tribes
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50 free Native American Tribes trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Hundreds of distinct nations lived across North America long before the United States or Canada existed, and hundreds still govern themselves today. Each has its own homeland, history and customs, which is why a single label never fits them all. This quiz moves region by region: the woodlands of the Northeast and Southeast, the open grasslands of the Plains, the deserts and mesas of the Southwest, the Pacific coast and the far north. Expect questions on famous leaders, traditional homes and foods, treaties and reservations, and the tribal names that ended up on states, cities and even vehicles. It suits students preparing for a unit test, teachers who want a ready-made pre-quiz, and anyone who wants to know more than the handful of names from old Westerns.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which tribe's reservation, the largest in the United States, covers more land than the state of West Virginia?
Navajo
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.
Q 02Which tribe sent about $170 to famine victims in Ireland in 1847, a gift honoured by a sculpture in County Cork?
Choctaw
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.
Q 03Which tribe, forced west on the Trail of Tears, made Tahlequah, Oklahoma, its capital in 1839?
Cherokee
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.
Q 04Which confederacy of six nations has issued its own passports since 1923, carried by its national lacrosse team?
Iroquois
Iroquois passports began when the Cayuga statesman Deskaheh needed one to take his people's case to the League of Nations in Geneva.
Q 05Which Florida tribe says it is the only one in America never to have signed a peace treaty with the US?
Seminole
Seminole survivors, perhaps 200 of them, retreated deep into the Everglades after an 1850s war and were left alone without ever surrendering.
Q 06Which US state alone is home to 229 federally recognized tribes, about two in five of the national total?
Alaska
Alaska settled Native land claims in 1971 by handing titles to twelve regional corporations and more than 200 village corporations.
Q 07Which older name for Wisconsin's Ho-Chunk people is shared with a famous American brand of motorhome?
Winnebago
Winnebago came from a Potawatomi term for the people. The motorhome maker took it from the county where the company was founded in 1958.
Q 08Which Columbia River people gave their name to a trade jargon and to the US Army's CH-47 transport helicopter?
Chinook
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.
Q 09Sacagawea helped Lewis and Clark trade for horses in 1805 with which tribe, whose chief proved to be her brother?
Shoshone
Shoshone chief Cameahwait was recognised by Sacagawea as she interpreted, though the Shoshoni language uses one word for both brother and cousin.
Q 10Which people, portrayed as dying out in an 1826 James Fenimore Cooper novel, survive today as a Wisconsin nation?
Mohican
Mohican families moved from the Hudson Valley to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and then west, and are enrolled today in the Stockbridge-Munsee Community.
Q 11Which Great Plains nation, divided into Dakota and Lakota peoples, is collectively known as the Seven Council Fires?
Sioux
Sioux bands were exiled from Minnesota after the war of 1862, which broke out when treaty payments and rations failed to arrive on time.
Q 12Which tribe's village deep in the Grand Canyon is the only place in the US where mail still arrives by mule?
Havasupai
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.
Q 13Chiricahua, Mescalero and Jicarilla are major divisions of which Southwestern people, whose leaders included Cochise?
Apache
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.
Q 21The feared Dog Soldiers, defeated at Summit Springs in 1869, were a military society of which Plains tribe?
Cheyenne
Cheyenne Dog Soldiers came to operate as a band of their own, and many of them, including the leader Tall Bull, were half Lakota.
Q 22Which tribe's Montana reservation holds the Little Bighorn battlefield, where its men had served as Custer's scouts?
Crow
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.
Q 23Which tribe's Montana reservation lies just east of Glacier National Park and borders the Canadian province of Alberta?
Blackfeet
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.
Q 14Which tribe's mesa-top village of Oraibi, Arizona, has been lived in continuously since around the year 1100?
Hopi
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.
Q 15Which Plains nation of famed horse riders was led by Quanah Parker, the son of the captive Cynthia Ann Parker?
Comanche
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.
Q 16Which tribe of the inland Northwest developed the spotted Appaloosa breed and followed Chief Joseph in the war of 1877?
Nez Perce
Nez Perce breeders lost most of their horses after the 1877 war, and the Appaloosa declined for several decades before it was revived.
Q 17Pocahontas was a daughter of the leader of which alliance of about thirty Tidewater Virginia peoples?
Powhatan
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.
Q 18Which people, federally recognized today at Mashpee and on Martha's Vineyard, taught the Pilgrims to grow corn?
Wampanoag
Wampanoag activists have been reviving their language since a reclamation project began in 1993, and Mashpee High School started teaching it in 2018.
Q 19Which Plains dwelling with adjustable smoke flaps takes its English name from the Dakota and Lakota languages?
Tipi
Tipi poles ran 12 to 25 feet long and were called lodge poles in English, which is where the lodgepole pine got its name.
Q 20Which Sac and Fox athlete, Olympic champion in 1912, did the Associated Press rank the half-century's greatest?
Jim Thorpe
Jim Thorpe went on to play professional football and entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of its inaugural class in 1963.
Q 24Which Connecticut tribe opened Foxwoods as a bingo hall in 1986 and grew it into a giant casino resort?
Pequot
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.
Q 25Which people of the Alexander Archipelago are divided into Raven and Eagle moieties and weave Chilkat robes?
Tlingit
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.
Q 26Tecumseh, who built a pan-tribal alliance and founded Prophetstown with his brother in 1808, belonged to which tribe?
Shawnee
Shawnee resistance suffered when William Henry Harrison destroyed Prophetstown in 1811 while Tecumseh was away in the South recruiting allies.
Q 27Which Great Lakes people, more often called Chippewa in the United States, long mined and traded copper?
Ojibwe
Ojibwe and Chippewa are two renderings of the same word, and the people are also known for tapping maple trees for syrup.
Q 28Which Arctic people make up over four in five residents of Nunavut, the Canadian territory created in 1999?
Inuit
Inuit negotiators won the territory through a land claims agreement that split it from the Northwest Territories to give them self-government.
Q 29Which people, whose biggest band is Lac La Ronge in Saskatchewan, form the largest group of First Nations in Canada?
Cree
Cree traders, along with the Assiniboine, were key go-betweens in the trading networks of the northern plains.
Q 30Andrew Jackson defeated the Red Stick faction of which Southeastern nation at Horseshoe Bend in March 1814?
Creek
Creek traditionalists took the Red Stick name from their war clubs, about two feet long with red-painted wooden handles.