All about the ancient tribes
Before American colonization of the Plains, the Arikara lived along the Missouri River between the Cannonball and Cheyenne rivers in what are now North Dakota and South Dakota.
The hostility between the United States and the Arikara ended officially on 18 July 1825, when the two opponents signed a peace treaty. The U.S. Army and the Arikara never engaged in battle again.
Hidatsa, (Hidatsa: “People of the Willow”) also called Minitari or Gros Ventres of the River (or of the Missouri), North American Indians of the Plains who once lived in semipermanent villages on the upper Missouri River between the Heart and the Little Missouri rivers in what is now North Dakota.
Tribal group | Total | American Indian/Alaska Native alone |
---|---|---|
Total | 4,119,301 | 2,475,956 |
American Indian tribes | ||
Cherokee | 729,533 | 299,862 |
Navajo | 298,197 | 275,991 |
Arikara is a Caddoan language spoken by the Arikara Native Americans who reside primarily at Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. Arikara is close to the Pawnee language, but they are not mutually intelligible.
Taking place in 1823, the Arikara War is noted as the first Plains Indian War between the United States and the western Native Americans.
Within the U.S., there are 562 Native American tribes. The largest are Navajo, Cherokee and Sioux. More than 3 million people in the U.S. are Native people.
The ancestral Sioux most likely lived in the Central Mississippi Valley region and later in Minnesota, for at least two or three thousand years. The ancestors of the Sioux arrived in the northwoods of central Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin from the Central Mississippi River shortly before 800 AD.
Most of the land Lewis and Clark surveyed was already occupied by Native Americans. In fact, the Corps encountered around 50 Native American tribes including the Shoshone, the Mandan, the Minitari, the Blackfeet, the Chinook and the Sioux. Lewis and Clark developed a first contact protocol for meeting new tribes.
Today, the Shakopee Mdewakanton are believed to be the richest tribe in American history as measured by individual personal wealth: Each adult, according to court records and confirmed by one tribal member, receives a monthly payment of around $84,000, or $1.08 million a year.
Quahadis were the hardest, fiercest, least yielding component of a tribe that had long had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse’s stomach, something even the toughest Texas Ranger would not do.
The Navajo tribe is the most populous, with 308,013 people identifying with the group. The Cherokee tribe is the second most common, with 285,476 Americans identifying with that group.