Native American Culture Regions Map
Long before Europeans arrived, hundreds of Native nations lived across North America, each with its own language, government and way of life. Scholars group these nations into culture regions (also called culture areas): large areas where neighboring peoples lived in a similar environment and often shared ways of getting food, building homes and trading. This map quiz helps students in grades 5–12 find the ten culture regions of North America north of Mexico and match well-known nations to their homelands.
Pick Region Name to find each region, or Nations to find the home region of a group of nations. Practice the North, the West, or the East and Plains one at a time. Guided mode colors each region.
10culture regions
3groups to practice: North, West, East and Plains
570+tribal nations recognized by the US today
Quick questions
- What are the Native American culture regions?
- Ten regions scholars use to group the Native nations of North America north of Mexico by environment and way of life: the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, Plateau, Great Basin, California, Southwest, Great Plains, Northeast and Southeast.
- Where does this set of regions come from?
- From the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians, which built on the culture-area maps of anthropologists Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber in the early 1900s. Some textbooks combine the Northeast and Southeast as the Eastern Woodlands, or split the Great Plains into northern and southern parts.
- Do Native nations still live in these regions?
- Yes. Native nations are living communities with their own governments today: more than 570 tribal nations are federally recognized in the United States, and Canada has more than 600 First Nations as well as Inuit and Métis communities. Many nations were forced off their homelands, so their lands today can be far from the region on this map. In the 1830s, for example, the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole were forced from the Southeast to Indian Territory, today’s Oklahoma.
- Which nations lived on the Great Plains?
- Among many others, the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow (Apsáalooke), Blackfoot (Niitsitapi), Comanche, Kiowa, Pawnee, Osage and Mandan.
- Which region was home to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)?
- The Northeast. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, joined by the Tuscarora in the 1700s) lived in what is now upstate New York.
- What is the Southwest culture region known for?
- Farming in a dry land, with corn, beans and squash. The Hopi and the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico have lived in their towns for centuries, and the Diné (Navajo) and Apache came to the region later.
All 10 culture regions and some of their nations
North
- Arctic – Inuit, I\u00f1upiat, Yup\u2019ik, Unangan (Aleut)
- Northwest Coast – Tlingit, Haida, Kwakwaka\u2019wakw, Chinook
- Subarctic – Cree, Dene, Gwich\u2019in, Innu
West
- California – Pomo, Miwok, Chumash, Yurok
- Great Basin – Shoshone, Paiute, Ute, Washoe
- Plateau – Nez Perce (Nimiipuu), Yakama, Salish (Flathead)
- Southwest – Din\u00e9 (Navajo), Hopi, Apache, Tohono O\u2019odham
East and Plains
- Great Plains – Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, Pawnee
- Northeast – Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Wampanoag, Ojibwe, Lenape
- Southeast – Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Seminole
Sources and simplifications
Regions follow the culture areas of the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians (William C. Sturtevant, general editor, 1978–2008), the scheme also used by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and most textbooks. The lines are generalized and drawn by hand from the Handbook’s maps. Real borders between peoples were never sharp lines, nations moved over time, and the map shows homelands around the time of first European contact, which came at different times in different places. Scholars place a few peoples near the edges in different regions; this map follows common practice in putting the Caddo homeland of east Texas and Louisiana with the Southeast, and the Coahuiltecan and Karankawa peoples of south Texas with the Southwest. The Southwest reaches farther into northern Mexico than the map shows, and Greenland, home of the Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit), is shown with the Arctic. Nations are named by the names they use for themselves where those are widely known, with the common English name in parentheses. The count of federally recognized tribes is from the US Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Teachers: run a Class Conquest with your whole class, or see what a Teacher code unlocks.
Standards
This map is aligned with:
- C3 Framework D2.Geo.2.6-8: Use maps and other representations to explain how the locations of places and regions relate to each other.
- National Geography Standard 1: Use maps and other geographic representations to understand and communicate information.
- National Geography Standard 2: Use mental maps to organize information about people, places and environments.
- National Geography Standard 5: People create regions to make sense of Earth’s complexity.
Alignment is our own. The groups that write these standards have not reviewed or endorsed Atlas Conquest.
Printable test for this map
Teachers can print the Native American Culture Regions Map Test with an answer key, with or without a word bank, and in A and B versions so neighbors can’t copy. See the Native American Culture Regions Map Test or browse all printable map tests.
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