Arctic

A frozen desert near the Arctic Circle (present-day Alaska, Canada and Greenland) was home to the Inuit and the Aleut, who speak dialects of the Eskimo-Aleut family.

Some of its northern peoples, especially the Inuit, were nomads, following seals, polar bears and other game as they migrated across the tundra.

In the southern part of the region, the Aleut were more settled, living in small fishing villages along the shore.

Many lived in dome-shaped houses made of sod or timber (or, in the North, ice blocks). They used seal and otter skins to make warm, weatherproof clothing, aerodynamic dogsleds and long, open fishing boats (kayaks in Inuit; baidarkas in Aleut).

Not many survived decades of oppression and exposure to European diseases, and only a few thousands are inhabitants of the area today.

Subarctic

These swampy, piney forests (taiga) and waterlogged tundra, stretched across much of inland Alaska and Canada, was home to Athabaskan speakers, among them the Tsattine (Beaver), Gwich'in (or Kuchin) and the Deg Xinag (formerly—and pejoratively—known as the Ingalik), and the Algonquian speakers at its eastern end, including the Cree, the Ojibwa and the Naskapi.

In this area travel was difficult—toboggans, snowshoes and lightweight canoes were the primary means of transportation—and population was sparse, living in easy-to-move tents and lean-tos, and underground dugouts.

The growth of the fur trade in the 17th/18th centuries disrupted the Subarctic way of life: instead of hunting and gathering for subsistence, the Indians focused on supplying pelts to the European traders. Eventually this led to the displacement or extermination of many.

Northeast

This area was one of the first to have sustained contact with Europeans, and stretched from Canada's Atlantic coast to North Carolina and inland to the Mississippi River valley.

Natives were either Iroquoian speakers (Cayuga, Oneida, Erie, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora), most of whom lived along inland rivers and lakes in fortified, politically stable villages, or Algonquian speakers (Pequot, Fox, Shawnee, Wampanoag, Delaware and Menominee) who lived in small farming and fishing villages along the ocean. There, they grew crops like corn, beans and vegetables.

Iroquoian groups tended to be aggressive and warlike, and colonial wars repeatedly forced the region's Indigenous people to take sides, pitting the Iroquois groups against their Algonquian neighbors.

As white settlement pressed westward, it eventually displaced both from their lands.

Southeast

This area, north of the Gulf of Mexico and south of the Northeast, was a humid, fertile agricultural region. Many of its natives were expert farmers—they grew staple crops like maize, beans, squash, tobacco and sunflower—who organized their lives around small ceremonial and market villages known as hamlets. The most familiar Indigenous peoples are the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole, sometimes called the Five Civilized Tribes, who spoke a variant of the Muskogean language.

By the time the U.S. had won its independence from Britain, many were lost to disease and displacement. In 1830, the federal Indian Removal Act compelled the relocation of what remained of the Five Civilized Tribes so that white settlers could have their land.

Nearly 100,000 Indigenous people were forced out of the southern states and into "Indian Territory" (later Oklahoma) west of the Mississippi. The Cherokee called this frequently deadly trek the Trail of Tears.

The Plains

A vast prairie region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, this area extended from present-day Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Before European contact, its inhabitants—speakers of Siouan, Algonquian, Caddoan, Uto-Aztecan and Athabaskan languages—were relatively settled hunters and farmers.

After Spanish colonists brought horses to the region in the 18th century, they became more nomadic.

Groups like the Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapaho used horses to pursue great herds of buffalo across the prairie and are known for their elaborately feathered war bonnets.

The most common dwelling was the cone-shaped teepee, a bison-skin tent that could be folded up and carried anywhere.

As white traders and settlers moved west they brought knives and kettles, which Indigenous people came to depend on; guns; and disease. By the end of the 19th century, white sport hunters had nearly exterminated the area's buffalo herds and natives were forced onto government reservations.

Southwest

Inhabitants of a huge desert region in present-day Arizona and New Mexico (along with parts of Colorado, Utah, Texas and Mexico) developed two distinct ways of life.

Sedentary farmers such as the Hopi, the Zuni, the Yaqui and the Yuma grew crops like corn, beans and squash, and lived in permanent settlements built of stone and adobe, known as pueblos, which featured great multistory dwellings resembling apartment houses.

More nomadic natives, such as the Navajo and the Apache, survived by hunting, gathering and raiding their more established neighbors for their crops. Their homes were much less permanent than the pueblos, like the Navajo's iconic eastward-facing round houses, known as hogans, made of mud and bark.

By the time the southwestern territories became a part of the U.S. after the Mexican War, many of the region's native people had already been killed.  During the second half of the 19th century, the federal government resettled most of the region's remaining natives onto reservations.

The Great Basin

This area, an expansive bowl formed by the Rocky Mountains to the east, the Sierra Nevadas to the west, the Columbia Plateau to the north, and the Colorado Plateau to the south, was a barren wasteland of deserts, salt flats and brackish lakes.

Its people, most of whom spoke Shoshonean or Uto-Aztecan dialects (Bannock, Paiute and Ute), foraged for roots, seeds and nuts and hunted snakes, lizards and small mammals. Because they were always on the move, they lived in compact, easy-to-build wikiups made of willow poles or saplings, leaves and brush.

Their settlements and social groups were impermanent, and communal leadership (what little there was) was informal.

After European contact, some groups got horses and formed equestrian hunting and raiding bands that were similar to the ones we associate with the Great Plains natives.

After white prospectors discovered gold and silver in the region in the mid-19th century, most of them lost their land and, frequently, their lives.

California

The temperate California area had more people than any other North American landscape, approximately 300,000 people in the mid-16th century, part of 100 different tribes and groups speaking more than 200 dialects.

These languages were derived from the Penutian (the Maidu, Miwok and Yokuts), the Hokan (the Chumash, Pomo, Salinas and Shasta), the Uto-Aztecan (the Tubabulabal, Serrano and Kinatemuk) and the Athapaskan (the Hupa, among others).

Despite this great diversity, many natives lived very similar lives: they did not practice much agriculture; they organized themselves into small, family-based bands of hunter-gatherers known as tribelets, and inter-tribelet relationships, based on well-established systems of trade and common rights, were generally peaceful.

Spanish explorers infiltrated the region in the mid-16th century. In 1769, the cleric Junipero Serra established a mission at San Diego, inaugurating a particularly brutal period in which forced labor, disease and assimilation nearly exterminated the native population.

Northwest Coast

The area along the Pacific coast from British Columbia to the top of Northern California, with mild climate and an abundance of natural resources, the ocean and the rivers, provided salmon, whales, sea otters, seals and fish and shellfish of all kinds. As a result, unlike hunter-gatherers who struggled to eke out a living and were forced to follow animal herds, the area Indians were secure enough to build permanent villages housing hundreds of people and operated according to a rigidly stratified, sophisticated social structure.

A person's status was determined by his closeness to the village's chief and reinforced by the number of possessions—blankets, shells, skins, canoes and even slaves—he had at his disposal. Goods like these played an important role in the potlatch, an elaborate gift-giving ceremony designed to affirm these class divisions.

Prominent groups included the Athapaskan Haida and Tlingit; the Penutian Chinook, Tsimshian and Coos; the Wakashan Kwakiutl and Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka); and the Salishan Coast Salish.