The Map Of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before

[Igel]

22. The map's a representative fiction.

It's not false. But it's not true.

He took earliest mentions of names of tribes and tried to avoid exonyms. The problem is that in much of the territory plagues had swept through before "first contact." In others, first contact happened in 1520, in others it happened in 1720. During that time tribes came and went as the result of disease, war, famine. As tribes spread out, they differentiated.

It also suffers from the problems that modern ethnolinguistics has. Take the "Lapplanders", the Saami (or whatever they're called now). If they compare themselves with outsiders, there's one language. But when it comes to establishing a standard, there are perhaps a dozen "languages," each with its norm and tribe behind it. So are they one tribe or many? It's not a historical problem--you get 40 of them together from different tribes, and you get a different answer in the morning in one context from in the afternoon, in a different content. At one point I studied "Serbo-Croatian"; now I have to specify that I studied ekavski stokavski Serbian, because the language is split into three N-S dialect zones, two E-W zones, and between Bosnian, Montenegran, Serbian, and Croatian. What was one language with different "varieties" is now a dozen languages. It's the same problem in determining the speciation of plants like echinofossulocactus in the Sonoran or Haworthia in S. Africa--how different does something need to be from something else before it's in a different category and gets a different name? Both botanists, linguists, and ethnologists form "splitters" and "lumpers".

Look at this guy's map for New Jersey. It's a large area. Other similarly wooded, fertile areas have multiple tribes. But he has one, because that's how they were perceived and how they found it convenient to band together. Given a different context, it's likely that they'd have been numerous tribes. Or the one tribe there had recently been busy with a genocidal campaign that wiped out the previous groups or assimilated them. (Or they'd recently spread into areas recently depopulated as a result of disease.)