Not many non-scholars these days have read all or part of the great Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome, but I am sure that those who have were greatly challenged by reading about so many, many different peoples with unrecognizable names and their often changing and generally puzzling geographical locations. And all these very energetic groups just in what we call Italy today? But you don’t have to go all the way back to the origins of Rome to be confused. Even an historical map of pre-Augustan Italy produces regions that barely ring a bell (Acalabria, Apulia, Samnium, Picenum, Umbria—just up the Adriatic coast), and we’re not talking about peoples with languages of their own.
So in this context let me ask you: Do you speak Salish, Tonkawa, Keres, Timucua, or Penutian? Well, actually, these aren’t languages. They are linguistic stocks—meaning that each one breaks into two or more actual languages. Have I confused you enough so that you’ve assumed I’m talking of ancient language stocks in Italy? Well, Keres, up there, should have stopped you. The Romans rarely used the letter K. These are American Indian linguistic stocks. There are eighteen. Iroquoian and Algonkian are two others, but I didn’t include them in my list above lest I give the game away. To distinguish between a language stock and a language, Navaho is one language that belongs to the Na-Dene linguistic stock.
According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there are 336 Indian tribes. You can look here to see a list. Years ago now my outfit prepared an award-winning publication entitled Statistical Record of Native North Americans. It was then that I became aware of the very large number of “nations” resident in the United States now—and more yet existed in the days of the European invasion. In that book we found adequate statistics to cover 200 tribes. Others were too small to see even through a statistical lens directly focused on them. And BIA identifies 562 tribal entities, thus further subdivisions of the 336 tribes. The closer you look, the more you see. Ultimately it costs too much to collect statistics at ever smaller scales. The lens loses its resolution.
All this came back to me a couple of days ago when I mentioned Whites, Blacks, Asians, and American Indians. Using that last term I was simplifying. The phrase in my source was “American Indian and Alaskan Native persons.” But that phrase, of course, was also an abbreviation, is also a simplification—when you look closer. The differences between American Indian tribes is significant—meaningfully much, much greater than any differences, say, between Norwegians and Italians, Hungarians and the Irish.
With Christianity in the back- and technology in the foreground, western civilization has produced a great blending of the tribal diversity so puzzling in the writings of Theodor Mommsen. Now we’re much more alike. But we’ve been in the homogenizer for 2,000 years. The American Native tribes have felt it only for about 300. They still tenaciously retain their identities—despite driving pickup trucks just like everybody else.
I thought you might enjoy seeing the linguistic map from which I have been cribbing, courtesy of Wikipedia here. Clicking on the map will give you facilities to enlarge portions of the map.
Filed under: Culture, Statistics Tagged: | Indian Tribes, Languages, Native Americans
