FIVE TRIBES

For thousands of years, North America has been inhabited by a wide variety of peoples with a variety of language groups, living styles, and family and tribal structures. And cultural values like deep spirituality and survival skills have helped them well into modern times.

With such diverse cultures and populations among indigenous groups in particular, it can be difficult to know where to begin learning about your ancestors. This is especially true if you don’t have the name of a tribe, or are basing your research off vague (or worse, terribly inaccurate) family stories about Native ancestry.

To help get you started, this article shares information on researching ancestors who were part of the five largest contemporary tribes: Navajo, Cherokee, Sioux, Chippewa and Choctaw. Each of the seven lessons that follow will help you better understand the cultural context for genealogy research of those tribes, and share some resources for finding records.

LESSON 1

TRIBAL NAMES

Tribal groups were often referred to in a variety of ways in records. Europeans generally had their own names for tribes (some of them derogatory), spelled phonetically based on what they heard from Native speakers.

Because of this, many of the names we associate with tribes today are exonyms and weren’t how the tribes originally called themselves. In fact, they may literally mean “enemy” or another negative term. For example, “Sioux” is actually the Ojibwe word for “snakes”; Europeans picked up the name from the