Native American Indian Population

Cherokee Indians have been around for many years, but when the topic of Native Americans is discussed it is only about the struggles and hardships they went through but never their actual culture of how and where they originated or how they came to be. There are many interesting things to learn about Cherokee Indians such as their heritage, religion, language, and their traditional songs, dances, and food.

Long before the Western countries discovered North America, the Native Americans lived and thrived here. Historians believe these wandering peoples crossed over a land bridge that formed when the earth froze over, officially named Beringia, to get to North America. These nomadic Natives began spreading and forming different tribes around North America. One of the many tribes was the Ais Indians of Florida. By themselves, the tribes reigned the New World, but contact with the Westerns began their tragic demise.

The Sioux and Chippewa Indian tribes’ have a drastically different way of living compared to what other people are accustomed to in terms of their history, clothing, tools, and weapons needed for survival. The Sioux Indians were originally from Asia, but migrated to America about 30,000 years ago. Their long, straight jet-black hair resembles that of the Asian descendants. The Sioux tribes were located in The Great Plains, which consists of 7 different states Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota; however, they were also known to live in parts of Nebraska, Illinois, and Montana. “The name Sioux is an abbreviation of Nadouessioux. (Britannica) The name was given to them by the Ojibwa (Chippewa). Sioux means, “Little snake”. The Sioux tended to follow the pattern of the buffalo, which is why they are found in multiple locations.

The first Americans came from Asia, beginning as early as thirty thousand years ago, over a land bridge that formed at the Bering Strait during the Ice Age. The new immigrants were hunters and gatherers, and over a period of fifteen thousand years various groups spread over the American continents. By the time of the European “discovery” of the New World, there were perhaps as many as 100 million native Americans, the vast majority living in Central and South America.

Native Americans were the first people to live in America before any other man came. It is believed that the Native Americans came from Asia way back during the Ice Age through a land bridge of the Bering Strait. When the Europeans first set foot on America, there were about 10 million Native Americans living in America, North of Mexico (“American”). Native Americans had all separated and made their own tribes. Some of the many Native American tribes that still exist are those of the Iroquoian tribes, consisting of five, now six,

Native Americans have been forced out of their culture over time, forced into assimilation, lost their rights, and have lost their land due to policies and laws by the whites that can’t bear the Native American way of life. There used to be many Native American tribes all throughout North America, and now these tribes are spread across the country and are blended into the rest of the population. The native ways have changed drastically in the last two centuries due to relocation programs, Indian boarding schools, and the way to classify which tribe each person belongs to. Native Americans have endured so much pain, which results from everything they have lost over time, and they have constantly paid the price for their ethnicity.

There were a large amount of Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans. Before reading 1491 by Charles C. Mann, I believed that there were only a small amount of people in the Americas. According to Henry F. Dobyns, the “Western Hemisphere held 90 to 112 million people”, which was more than the amount of people living in Europe.

What was later known as the United States of America was home to six to ten million American Indians that were separated into hundreds of tribes. Each tribe had different values, cultural strains, and beliefs. Throughout the years there were government polices against the American Indians. According to the book Strangers to These Shores the author states that American Indians are poor in income, employment, and housing (Parrillo, 206).

These people that we broadly categorize as Native Americans descended from a small band of men and women who had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge between Alaska and Siberia about 12,000 years ago. The bridge closed about a thousand years after their arrival, effectively barring anyone else from joining them. As a result, they effectively closed themselves out from the rest of the world for thousands of years. This gave them the chance to thoroughly “explore the entire continent” and learn how to properly cultivate the land around them, and also grow their population to 10s of millions (Resendez 139).

There are 562 federally recognized Indian tribes each with their own culture, language, and history. Before the Europeans invaded the Natives land, every tribe was unique in the way they dress, their language, what they ate, and their customs. Native Americans culture were taken away, as they were

Indigenous people in the Americas or “Indians” as Christopher Columbus first named them on an exploration voyage in 1492, had their lives completely change almost immediately upon the arrival of European settlers. Settlement in the “New World” as

The events of the expansion of British America, the decline of the Native American population in the east, and the transition from indentured servitude to race-based servitude in the period of 1660 - 1700 shared a close relationship with one another (Schultz, 2013). First, the creation of proprietary colonies allowed their ruler to establish governments as they wished, as long as their laws aligned with those of England. This freedom to rule a colony was extremely attractive because if ruled successfully, the ruler or proprietors of that colony had an opportunity to become wealthy. Furthermore, African slaves discovered that rice could be easily grown in areas where it was thought that there were little agriculture benefits. Next, William Penn promoted a colony which encompassed religious freedom and easy access to land. Penn recruited people from Europe to inhabit his colony, and what we now know today as Pennsylvania, grew exponentially.

| Native Americans (American Indians)As the name suggests, these were the first people (natives) who lived in North America, Alaska and Hawaii. After Europeans settled in the U.S., native

Before encountering with the Europeans in about 1000 c.e., roughly fifty-four million Native Americans took over the two American continents. This all happened following the Ice Age; making sea level drop exposing the bridge connecting Eurasia with North America. Asian hunters, also known as “ immigrant” ancestors of Native American decided to explore crossing the bridge. Over the centuries the people decided to split into innumerable amount of tribes. Listing the commonly known and or familiar tribes, The Incas in Peru, Mayans in Central America, and Aztec in Mexico. All producing different languages and developing different senses of religion, cultures and ways of life.

American Indians is a native American inhabitants of North America. Paleo-Indians are the person who originally entered America and settled and they mainly lived in Mexico and South America. The three important things we need to know about American Indians prior to European invasion are the culture of Maya, Aztec, and the Anasazi.