Tribal Names of the Americas

Over the years, many writers and historians have attempted to identify the names of indigenous tribes in the New World, a task made difficult by the sheer number of indigenous groups but complicated even further by the fact that many of these names have been passed down only through oral tradition. But beyond the small number of indigenous tribes which are identified in standard history volumes and textbooks, there are thousands of other indigenous groups which, while lesser known, still deserve to have their existence recorded and recognized.This book is an index of tribal names collected from printed sources on indigenous peoples in the New World. Because most of these original source materials had attempted to reproduce words which had only been verbalized previously, there was a great deal of variation between sources. Organized alphabetically, this index collates these variations, tracing them to the spellings and forms which have become standardized over the years. Each entry includes the tribal name, the tribe's 'parent group' or ancestral tribe, the original source for the tribal name, and the approximate location of the name in the original source material.