Indian languages. Over thousands of years and a large stretch of geography,
each society elaborated from the common ancestor its own way of thought
and speech.
When the French explorer Sammuel Champlain landed on the Saint
Lawrence in 1608, he encountered a people speaking Algonquian, a lan-
guage related to the language spoken far to the south in Virginia. What that
seemingly unlikely fact tells us is that the two groups must have originally
been one people; as one or both migrated, they first became neighbors and
finally strangers, just the way our European ancestors did.
The largest, most sophisticated, and most warlike of the northeastern
Indian societies were speakers of Iroquoian. When the explorers first
encountered them, they had divided into five nations but were still linked
by a confederation which they called Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian for “the
Long House”). The 6,000 or so members of the confederation were tribes
known as the Kaniengebaga (or, as their enemies called them, the
Mohawks), the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. Related to
them and speaking dialects of Iroquois were the Cherokee and Tuscarora,
who had earlier migrated southward.
Another family of languages was Siouan, spoken by peoples who domi-
nated the Piedmont southward from Maryland. They included the
Catawba, Saponi, Tutelo, Occaneechee, and Cheraw of the Carolinas and
the Creek of what became Georgia, as well as scores of smaller, now mainly
forgotten groups.
A fourth collection of societies, the North American native people the
Spaniards first knew, spoke varieties of Muskhogean and inhabited the Gulf
coastal region from Georgia to the Mississippi.
Speakers of these four groups of languages, the Native Americans living
east of the Mississippi, probably numbered about 2 million on the eve of
first contact with Europeans.
As they spread out over North America, the Indians developed such
distinctive characteristics as to seem alien to one another, just as the
European and African nations did. Frequently clashing with one another as
they sought to defend or enlarge territories, each emphasized its unique-
ness. Many of the Indian names for themselves meant “thepeople” or “the
realpeople”; that is, each group asserted that it was fundamentally unlike
The Native Americans 5