Muskogean was the most important language family of the Native American Southeastern Culture Area. In her introduction to Florida Place Names of Indian Origin and Seminole Personal Names, Patricia Riles Wickman writes: “We shall never know with any certainty how many dialects derived from this mother tongue and from the social template that contained an … Continued
The Maryhill Museum located near Goldendale, Washington, has a display of Plateau stone artifacts. The Plateau Culture Area is the area between the Cascade Mountains and the Rocky Mountains in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, and Western Montana. From north to south it runs from the Fraser River in the north to the Blue Mountains … Continued
Miguel Trujillo of Isleta Pueblo and his daughter. Trujillo, a World War II veteran, successfully battled state authorities in 1948 for his right to vote in New Mexico nearly a quarter century after Congress extended citizenship to all Indians. Efforts to suppress the Native vote continue today in several states. Vote-by-mail has made it much … Continued
When the Spanish explorer Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo arrived in what was to become Los Angeles in 1542, his ship anchored off Santa Catalina Island where it was greeted by a large canoe filled with Indian people who called themselves kumi.vit, and who would later be identified as the Gabreleño/Gabrielino-Tongva. The Gabreleño-Tongva occupied the area as … Continued
One of the characteristics of American culture is an obsession with private property. The idea of holding land in common, as was the practice of Indian nations, was seen as uncivilized, un-Christian, and a barrier to civilization. The policies of the American government with regard to Indian nations were generally based on socioreligious concepts rather … Continued
Sealth was born about 1786. His father, Schweabe, was Suquamish and his mother, Scholitza, was Duwamish. As a young boy in 1792, he witnessed the arrival of the first Europeans to his area: British Captain George Vancouver entered Puget Sound and traded with the Suquamish. In his short biography of Seattle in the Encyclopedia of … Continued
The Southwest Culture Area is a culturally diverse area. Geographically it covers all of Arizona and New Mexico and includes parts of Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas as well as parts of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Much of this area is semi-arid; part of it is true desert (southern Arizona); and part … Continued
One of the displays in the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands, California, is entitled Sacred Earth and subtitled Understanding our past and honoring cultures that thrive today. The nature of California and Southwestern Indian culture began to change with the European invasion four centuries ago. One of the displays in the Museum looks at … Continued
For thousands of years the Cahuilla lived in what would become Southern California. It is not known when the Cahuilla had their first contact with the European explorers/invaders. In 1540, the Spanish explorers Hernando de Alarcón and Melchor Díaz reached the area near present-day Yuma, Arizona. The Spanish had sailed up the Gulf of California … Continued
In providing a broad overview of the hundreds of distinct American Indian cultures found in North America, it is common for museums, historians, archaeologists, and ethnologists to use a culture area model. This model is based on the observation that different groups of people living in the same geographic area often share many cultural features. … Continued
