An
Indian tribe is any extant or historical tribe, band, nation, or other group or community of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
The term is defined in the United States for some federal government purposes to include only tribes that are
federally recognized by the
Bureau of Indian AffairsThe Bureau of Indian Affairs is an agency of the federal government of the United States within the US Department of the Interior charged with the administration and management of 55.7 million acres of land held in trust by the United States for Native Americans in the United States, Native...
, established pursuant to the
Alaska Native Claims Settlement ActThe Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, commonly abbreviated ANCSA, was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon on December 18, 1971, the largest land claims settlement in United States history. ANCSA was intended to resolve the long-standing issues surrounding aboriginal land claims in...
[43 U.S.C.
An
Indian tribe is any extant or historical tribe, band, nation, or other group or community of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Legal definition in the United States
The term is defined in the United States for some federal government purposes to include only tribes that are
federally recognized by the
Bureau of Indian AffairsThe Bureau of Indian Affairs is an agency of the federal government of the United States within the US Department of the Interior charged with the administration and management of 55.7 million acres of land held in trust by the United States for Native Americans in the United States, Native...
, established pursuant to the
Alaska Native Claims Settlement ActThe Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, commonly abbreviated ANCSA, was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon on December 18, 1971, the largest land claims settlement in United States history. ANCSA was intended to resolve the long-standing issues surrounding aboriginal land claims in...
[43 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.]. Such tribes, including
Alaska NativeAlaska Natives are the indigenous peoples of Alaska. They include: Inupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Eyak, and a number of Northern Athabaskan cultures.-History:In 1912 the Alaska Native Brotherhood was founded...
village or regional or village corporations recognized as such, are eligible for the special programs and services provided by the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
Some tribes are recognized at the
stateA U.S. state is any one of 50 federated states of the United States of America that share sovereignty with the federal government . Because of this shared sovereignty, an American is a citizen both of the federal entity and of his or her state of domicile...
level using procedures defined by various states, without regard to federal recognition. Other tribes are unrecognized because they no longer exist as an organized group or because they have not completed the certification process established by the government entities in question.
A few of the more well-known tribes include:
- Abenaki
- Algonquin
The Algonquins are aboriginal/First Nations inhabitants of North American who speak Algonquin. Culturally and linguistically, they are closely related to the Odawa and Ojibwe, with whom they form the larger Anicinàpe grouping...
- Apache
Apache is the collective term for several culturally related groups of Native Americans in the United States originally from the American Southwest. These indigenous peoples of North America speak a Southern Athabaskan language, and are related linguistically to the languages of Athabaskan...
- Cherokee
The Cherokee are a Native American people from the Southeastern United States...
- Choctaw
The Choctaw are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States . They are of the Muskogean linguistic group...
- Comanche
The Comanche are a Native American ethnic group whose range consisted of present-day eastern New Mexico, southern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, southern Kansas, all of Oklahoma, and most of northwest Texas. Originally, the Comanches were hunter-gatherers, with a typical Plains Indian culture....
- Hopi
The Hopi are American Indians people who primarily live on the 12,635 km² Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. The Hopi Reservation is entirely surrounded by the much larger Navajo Reservation. The two nations used to share the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Area...
- Iroquois
The Iroquois , also known as the Haudenosaunee or the "People of the Longhouse", are an indigenous people of North America. In the 16th century or earlier, the Iroquois came together in an association known as the Iroquois League, or the "League of Peace and Power"...
- Lakota Sioux
- Mahicans (also Mohicans)
The Mahicans are an Eastern Algonquian Native American tribe, originally settling in the Hudson River Valley , many then moving to Stockbridge, Massachusetts after 1780, before the remaining descendants moved to northeastern Wisconsin during the 1820s and 1830s.The tribe's name for itself was...
- Mindowaskens
- Mohave
Mohave and Mojave are both tribally accepted and interchangeably used phonetic spellings for a Native American people known among themselves as the Aha macave...
- Mohawk
Mohawk" are an indigenous people of North America originally from the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York to southern Quebec and eastern Ontario. Their current settlements include areas around Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River in Canada...
- Navajo
The Navajo or Diné of the Southwestern United States are the second largest Native American tribe of Northern America. In the 2000 U.S. census, 298,197 people claimed to be fully or partly of Navajo ancestry. The Navajo Nation constitutes an independent governmental body which manages the Navajo...
- Nipmuc
- Ojibwa
The Ojibwe or Chippewa is the largest group of Native Americans-First Nations north of Mexico, including Métis. They are the third-largest in the United States, surpassed only by Cherokee and Navajo. They're equally divided between the United States and Canada...
- Seminole
The Seminole are a Native American people originally of Florida, who now reside primarily in that state and Oklahoma. The Seminole nation was formed in the 18th century in a process of ethnogenesis...
- Seneca
The Seneca are a group of indigenous people native to North America. They were the nation located farthest to the west within the Six Nations or Iroquois League in New York before the American Revolution. While exact population figures are unknown, approximately 15,000 to 25,000 Seneca live in...
- Sioux
Sioux are a Native American and First Nations people. The term can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or any of the nation's many dialects...
- Wyandottes
The Wyandot are indigenous peoples of North America, known in their native language as the Wendat. Modern Wyandots emerged in the 17th century from the remnants of two earlier groups, the Huron Confederacy and the Petun...
- Zuni
The Zuni or A:shiwi are a Native American tribe, one of the Pueblo peoples, most of whom live in the Pueblo of Zuni on the Zuni River, a tributary of the Little Colorado River, in western New Mexico, United States...
Other uses
In addition to their status as legal entities, tribes have political, social, historical, and other aspects. The term is also used to refer to various groups of
Native AmericansThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples...
bound together for social, political, or religious purposes, including descendants of members of these groups. Tribes are typically characterized by distinct territory, and common
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
or
dialectThe term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by scholars of language. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other...
.. Other characteristics include common
cultureCulture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
and ethnicity.
Tribes are susceptible to overlapping external and internal definition. Whereas outsiders use their own definitions for what a tribe is, and who is a member, depending on the purpose, tribes may have their own definition of identity and membership. To the extent that many tribes are acknowledged as sovereign nations, the United States does recognize some limited rights of tribes to decide membership by their own criteria.
Naming convention
Although the word "Indian" is somewhat disfavored to refer to
Native AmericansThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples...
, and there has been some controversy over appropriate terminology, usage has persisted and is less controversial when referring to the Tribes. The word is often included in the names of the various tribes themselves.
See also
- Federally recognized tribes
- State recognized tribes
- Unrecognized tribes
- Indian reservation
An Indian reservation is an area of land managed by a Native American tribe under the United States Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs. Because Native American tribes have limited national sovereignty, laws on tribal lands vary from the surrounding area...
- Indian reserve
In Canada, an Indian reserve is specified by the Indian Act as a "tract of land, the legal title to which is vested in Her Majesty, that has been set apart by Her Majesty for the use and benefit of a band." The Act also specifies that land reserved for the use and benefit of a band which is not...
- Native American name controversy
The Native American name controversy is a dispute over the acceptable terminology of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and to the broad subsets thereof, such as those living in a specific country or sharing certain cultural attributes....
- Tribal council
A Tribal Council is either: an association of Native American bands in the United States or First Nations governments in Canada, or the governing body for certain tribes within the United States or elsewhere...
- Tribal sovereignty
Tribal sovereignty refers to the inherent authority of indigenous tribes to govern themselves. At the foundation of the constitutional status of tribes is the idea that tribes have an inherent right to govern themselves—the power is not delegated by congressional acts. Congress can, however, limit...
External links