Two events of huge proportions mark the history of American Indians prior t o the establishment of our federal republic. The first was the migration of the Indian's ancestors out of Asia. The second was the arrival of Europeans in the western hemisphere. Each of these events was the beginning of a period of great change for people and their ways of life.
There is no record of when or why people first set foot in the new world. The most widely accepted theory is that they probably walked from the Chuckchee Peninsula in Siberia, across Bering Strait, which from time to time was high and dry, and onto what is now the Seward Peninsula in Alaska. There is no reason to believe that all of the people who migrated to the new world were from the same group. To the contrary, people with considerably different ways of life and appearance probably migrated from time to time.
Some groups found the new environments much to their liking and settled down. Many other groups never gave up their migratory habits. Instead, once in the western hemisphere, they slowly wandered from place to place in search of food or peace, after travelling hundreds, or even thousands of miles during a lifetime.
A good example of such migrators is the Sioux. Legends place them centuries ago in the area that is now the Southeastern United States. At the time of their first contact with non-Indians in the mid-l600s, they were living on land that later became Wisconsin. Subsequently, they moved westward, settling first in Minnesota, then in the 1700s moving out onto the prairies and eventually t o the great plains of the Dakotas. By the mid-l800s, they had spread into eastern Montana, northeastern Wyoming and northern Nebraska. By 1875 there were only a few small scattered groups left in Minnesota.
SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES
Anthropologists have classified tribal groups into culture areas on the basis of similarities and differences. These include woodsmen of the eastern forests, hunters of the plains, northern fishermen, seed gatherers, pueblo farmers, and desert dwellers. Although individual tribal groups in a culture area had many things in common, they did not consider themselves as a single, huge, well-integrated supergroup. Nor did members of one group like, cooperate with, or even become aware of the more distant groups within the same culture area. In fact, each culture area included groups which spoke languages not understood by other groups in the same area. Hundreds of Indian languages and dialects existed years ago as they do even today.