Cheyenne history: For a long time, Cheyenne people lived in Minnesota, along rivers like this one. Algonquin and Cheyenne Cheyenne people are related to the Algonquin people. From the Paleo-Indian period onward Cheyenne people lived in the Great Lakes area (in modern Minnesota). They were related to other Algonquin people like the Blackfoot and the Cree. "Cheyenne" is [...]
A Cree man In the 1500s AD, people who called themselves the Eenou lived in the northern part of North America, around what is now the border between the United States and Canada. Modern historians call them the Cree. They mostly lived in the forests of what is now Minnesota and Wisconsin. Their language was [...]
Blackfoot man with horse Throughout the 1500s and 1600s AD, the Blackfoot continued to live in the same way they had lived before 1500. But the lives of Blackfoot people changed a lot in about 1730 AD, when they got horses from other North American tribes. Once they had horses, they could hunt bison and get their food more easily [...]
People of the Algonquin tribe in the 1700s AD Algonquin people sold beaver furs to European traders When European traders began to buy huge amounts of North American furs to sell in Europe and China, Algonquin hunters began to trap and hunt lots of animals, especially beaver, to get their fur to sell to the European traders. Who [...]
A Cree deerskin jacket Kids in North America in the 1500s AD wore deerskin dresses or shirts and pants when it was cold, and they mostly went naked when it was warm. Often their moms cut down old worn-out grown-up clothes for their kids to wear, because clothes were so expensive. Grown-up women mostly wore long, loose [...]
Mound on Lake Marion, Santee River (thanks to Wikipedia) About 800 AD, ancestors of the Sioux people probably lived in the south-eastern part of North America, around where South Carolina is now. Like the Mississippians to their west, they built earth mounds, and probably they also farmed corn and beans and sunflowers. Around 1000-1300 AD, a global warming period encouraged [...]
Serpent Mound (Ohio, about 500 BC?) Shawnee people were related to the Algonquin and the Cree, and spoke a related Athabascan language, but they lived a little further south, in the mid-west (modern Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky). Indeed, the word "Shawnee" may mean "south people". The Shawnee lived more like their neighbors than like [...]
Cahokia mound in Illinois, where a Mississippian city was After 800 AD the Mississippian culture developed all along the Mississippi and the Missouri valleys, replacing the earlier Woodland culture. Now many people lived in towns. They built temples and palaces on top of big earth mounds. They had wooden fortification walls around their towns, with [...]
Typical Cree environment - Great Lakes wetland The Cree probably started out as part of the Athabascan crew. When other Native people spread out south and east, the Athabascans, or Dene, stayed up north. Their language became different. But then later, they moved south and east too. The Athabascans who moved to the [...]
Montana landscape with a moose calf wading People we call Athabascans or Dene lived in Blackfoot territory (modern Montana and Canada) in the Paleo-Indian period, by around 10,000 BC. They lived by hunting and gathering. They hunted mammoth, and gathered eggs and wild plants. By 6000 BC, in the Archaic period, the climate warmed up, so the big animals like mammoth became [...]
