Eastern Woodlands Indian Tribes
The Eastern Woodlands describes the North American Atlantic coast area, from the the Great Lakes south to the Gulf of Mexico. Indigenous people lived in these heavily forested areas between the Appalachians and Atlantic for many years.
The Eastern Woodlands are generally divided into Northeastern & Southeastern groups based on their language and culture.
Northeastern People
There were two major language groups in the northeast: the Algonquian and the Iroquois. These were distinct, separate languages spoken by different tribes in the region.
The Iroquois included the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes, which came together to form a confederacy.
The Confederacy came about as a result of the Great Law of Peace, an oral constitution also written on wampum belts sometime around the year 1142 when a solar eclipse occurred.
At its peak around 1700, Iroquois power extended from modern-day New York State into Canada and the Great Lakes region and Ohio Valley.
These people generally lived in large multifamily longhouses and are also known as the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse).
Village bands includes many clans were led by one chief. They had a matrilineal kinship system, with inheritance passed through the mother's line.
Algonquian tribes include the Lenape, Pequot, Narragansetts, and the Wampanoag. Most lived in oval wigwams and subsisted by hunting & fishing.
Algonquian-speaking did not plant many crops, but primarily relied on hunting for food. This varied based on their location, with the tribes close to the coast hunting seals, porpoises, and whales, while inland tribes hunted deer, moose, and caribou.
The Algonquian-speaking tribes had patrilineal clans, meaning the father's line and were associated with animal totems.
Southeastern People
The Eastern Woodlands also includes indigenous people of the southeast. This area was more linguistically diverse than the northeast and includes hundreds of different tribes.
Some of the larger, more well-known tribes are the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole. These were known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" by Americans because they adopted attributes of Anglo-American culture.
While many were hunters, they were also successful farmers of crops like corn, beans, & pumpkins. Their successful cultivation of corn allowed for larger, more complex chiefdoms consisting of larger villages. Corn became celebrated among numerous peoples in religious ceremonies, especially the Green Corn Ceremony.
Most people lived in permanent homes and the tribes were usually broken into clans and had structured governments.
Some were known for building large earthwork platform mounds like the Mississippians. Nanih Waiya, for example was a sacred Choctaw platform mound in modern-day Mississippi.
As the American colonies and then United States grew, these tribes were forced to sign treaties giving up their territory. Finally, most were forced to march along the Trail of Tears to reservations in Oklahoma.