Talk:Classification of Indigenous peoples of the Americas/Archive 1

1
Since the Classification portion of the Native American article forms the basis for this article, I have copied some relevant sections below from Talk: Native American. There may be some others, but the disambiguation discussion seemed especially pertinent. older &ne; wiser 13:59, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

How does the Regions list work?
It's not really clear how the Regions list is supposed to work. So many tribes were scattered or moved around. I added the Shawnee (Chief Tecumseh, you know), for example, under Eastern Woodlands, because they were originally from OH/PA/WV and in general tried to stay in that area when they could, but they lived in the South for a while and eventually scattered. The majority are in Oklahoma today. Does that mean they should go under OK and be considered a Great Plains tribe? mjb 05:27 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * I think it refers, primarily, to the cultural connections and not the geographic location. The Shawnee are culturally connected to the tribes from the Eastern Woodlands, more so than they are culturally connected to the other natives of Oklahoma.Tokerboy 06:05 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * The placement of tribes in the regional list is somewhat arbitrary. A few tribes can be listed in several, because they lived in both or migrated between them, Utes, Apache, Lakota. They should be listed in the region they had the most connection with. A very few tribes lived historically in Oklahoma; many were removed to Oklahome. In those cases their original location should be used.Fredbauder 11:18 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * Yes, looked again at the subject page. A contributor has added US state locations which reflect the contemporary location of the tribes. This is useful, although I noted some errors, but creates some ambiguity, as tribes are listed as Eastern Woodland and as living in Oklahoma. Fredbauder 11:25 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)


 * Why not have a table, common tribe name | tribe in own language | region of origin | current bulk of population?
 * ~ender 2003-09-09 21:45:MST

Native Americans officially make up the majority of the population in Bolivia and Guatemala and are significant in most other Hispanic American countries, with the possible exception of Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Uruguay.
 * How significant is the native population in Argentina and Chile? Rick

Disambiguation style
I would be good if we could chose one style to disambiguate with. So far I have noticed:
 * name tribe
 * name Tribe
 * name (tribe)
 * name (people)
 * name (Native American)
 * name (Native Americans)
 * name First Nation -even one for a U.S. tribe!
 * name Nation

Probably others. I would suggest using name (tribe) as the standard (partly since it appears to be the most widely used already.) I just used name Nation to disambiguate the Sac tribe and the Fox tribe from their merged current legal Sac and Fox Nation. So I don't think it makes a good tag since it has other uses. Rmhermen 16:17, Apr 8, 2004 (UTC)


 * I concur with using "Name (tribe)" as a standard for disambiguation. I think there should be redirects for at least "Name tribe" and "Name (people)", perhaps others as needed. I don't think it is imperative to go back and change already existing ones though. Bkonrad | Talk 01:51, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure I can think of any examples off the top of my head, but is it possible that there are some NA groups that would object to being referred to as "tribe"? Maybe "Name (people)" would be more general.  Or we could just use "Name (tribe)" unless there is some particular reason not to. - Nat Krause 02:35, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * This confusion has continued for now six years more of great article writing. Can we reach any new consensus?  I like "Name (people)" best, as it has that global usefulness to it.Duff (talk) 19:26, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Classification of Native Americans
The question seems to be how to classify the information so that it can be comprehended with a minimum of fuss. The information area called "Classification of Native Americans" seems to be about what kinds of Native Americans there were/are where and when with links to more specialized topics.

I will try to draft a scenario. Suppose I am a reasonably intelligent and well-motivated person who has never had the occasion to think or learn much about Native Americans. Suddenly I am made aware of native Americans as a group. (For example, in conversation someone mentions South American Indians. I am taken aback. There are Indians in South America? Well, of course, there are. But I never thought about that before. Come to think of it, what do I really know about North American Indians? Filled with chagrin at being so insensitive and ill-informed I rush to the Wikipedia for support.) What do I want to find.

Here is my personal answer:

1. A relatively short opening article explaining the meaning of concepts like tribe (and how inadequate they are), noting the existence of large Native American political units and explicting the differences bewteen race, political position and language. And an explanation of how the more detailed information is arranged.

2. Indices (at least two) presenting hierarchally arranged links. One index should be by location and another by language. A third might be a simple alphabetic list of everything that might come up no matter how inept.

I, personally, dislike hierarchies with more than about a half-dozen entries at each level and I like overall articles at every level.

3. The indices, and the synthesizing articles, eventually lead downward to the level of local Native American communities. Sometimes the higher level articles carry all the significant content (for example, most of the community names within the Inca empire are nothing more than names - but the next, or more likely second next, level above is the empire itself which implies a lot of content.

Sometimes the explosion at some level is really large in spite of my prejudices. The language situation in South America is such that dozens of co-equal language families must be recognized at the level below "Languages in South America". I would rather not allow Greenburg's "classification" to be mentioned. but I suppose scholarly honest demands that I acknowledge this and some other similar attempts in the disussion at the level of "Languages in South America". In North America  I imagine that Sapir's old classification could be used without infuriating anyone.

At the moment I don't see exactly how this program fits into the Wikipedia. I guess I need to become better informed about exactly how the Wikipedia works - Kleinecke 03/04/05


 * comment about language classification:


 * I think most will agree that Greenburg's classification should not be used for Native American language classification.


 * However, I think that Sapir's classification of North America is too old. There often wasnt enough good data during his lifetime to substantiate his proposals. As linguists now know a lot more about language in general when compared to Sapir's era. Some proposals of his are considered valid, some undemonstrated, and others need further research.


 * We can do better to look at more recent classifications. One of the best books on this is


 * Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. W. C. Sturtevant (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-1604-8774-9.


 * Other good books are


 * Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.


 * and


 * Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.


 * A beautiful recent map is


 * Goddard, Ives. (1999). Native languages and language families of North America (rev. & enlarged ed. with additions & corrections). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-9271-6. [1st ed. published in Goddard's (1996) Languages mentioned above.]


 * - Ish ishwar 04:31, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)

(By the way, Sapir's classification can be found here: Native American languages/Previous classifications.)

Ish Iswar, your comments seem to me all good and that, but you seem to be higlhy biased, as the rest of the article is, to the people who inhabited the area that would be the US in the years to come (i.e. the "north american indians"), leading to believe that there were no Native Americans, in the strict term, in Central and South Americas.


 * hi. thanks for the note. my comments above are mainly a reaction to use Sapir's classification, which is rather outdated but something similar is still used in many encyclopedias (!).


 * i am biased toward n. america, simply because that is only what i know. however, i will be expanding this article in the future to remedy this deficit (if no one beats me to it).


 * however, before embarking on this i am looking into the known families (& isolates/unclassifieds) of middle & south america. this will first go into the Native American languages article followed by Classification schemes for Native American languages (since the many classifications are interesting & important to get a good view of the subject). after that, i plan to create the individual family (& isolate) articles. only after this will i start to make a comprehensive list of peoples. but, you are welcome to help out before i get to it.


 * i start with n. america because it is easier to start with what i know. my contribution to this article is very small & the bias toward n. america was already present before i became involved. peace – ishwar  (speak)  05:24, 2005 July 29 (UTC)

Caddo
The Caddo are not considered part of the Southseastern not the Plains culture. I'm removing them from the plains section. -JCarriker 19:54, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
 * They are some of the most ancient residents of the Southern Plains. They are on the cusp. -Uyvsdi (talk) 02:39, 10 April 2009 (UTC)Uyvsdi

Indigenous peoples of the Americas
Consensus has been reached at Talk:Native Americans to split that article, with exclusively USA-related content remaining at Native Americans, and everything else going to Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Because this article deals with indigenous peoples of the entire Americas, I will be renaming it to Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas. Kurieeto 02:09, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
 * The lead sentence is misleading then. With the map of Canada, the U.S., and the lead sentence, I thought I had reached the wrong page when searching for a list of the names of South American tribes.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.124.87.208 (talk) 22:19, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
 * ✅ Dealt with the confusion of the lead sentence and paragraph, too.Duff (talk) 20:45, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
 * However, less weight on North American maps in the lead would be apropos. Duff (talk) 20:45, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

List of Native American tribes
List of Native American tribes was recently created, and seems to be a less structured attempt to do the same thing as this article. I've suggested a merge, and made the following comments on that page's talk page:

Why does this extist?
We have: Why did we need this poorly formatted list? -Harmil 16:36, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas
 * List of Native American Tribal Entities
 * List of Alaska Native Tribal Entities


 * Let me be clearer on that. LoNAmTE and LoNAkTE are lists maintained by the US government (we also have lists of state-recognized-only tribes). CoipotA is a North and South American tribal classification scheme. Now, I could certainly see adding a list of indigenous or native peoples for other countries, but on the generic, high-level tribal list front, I think we're already set and this page would seem to be either a mistake (not realizing that the work has already been done) or an attempt to make changes that were or would have been reverted in existing articles. Either way, I think this could really use merging, and I'll note as such.


 * PS: Don't forget, we also have Category:Indigenous peoples of the Americas -Harmil 16:52, 22 August 2005 (UTC)


 * there are also the following:


 * List of Native American tribes
 * Tribes from A-to-Z
 * List of Indian Tribes A-E
 * List of Indian Tribes F-L
 * List of Indian Tribes M-R
 * List of Indian Tribes M-Z


 * kind of a mess. peace – ishwar  (speak)  08:08, 2005 September 12 (UTC)


 * some more:


 * List of South American Tribes
 * List of South American Tribes B
 * List of South American Tribes C
 * etc. etc. (!)


 * – ishwar  (speak)  16:41, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

discussion
About your work [User:ish_ishwar's work] on List of Native American tribes and Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas, I appreciate your enthusiasm and drive, but I put up the merge notice to foster discussion about the best way to do the merge. You also seem to be leaving both pages in a state of flux while you work, which is never desirable on Wikipedia (as it is constantly being used as a source of reference information). Would you mind backing out your changes long enough to get some consensus over the change? Thanks. -Harmil 19:26, 22 August 2005 (UTC)


 * ok, i was just being bold. wikipedia always seems to be in flux, as do my edits. i am somewhat worried that people would use this as a reference since it is in such a flux. i do, however, understand your concern. feel free to revert my work at List of Native American tribes. i would request that you not revert Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas because this list is missing many, many names some of which appear in List of Native American tribes: a revert would make the list smaller. i will not edit List of Native American tribes any further before the future discussion. peace – ishwar  (speak)  01:16, 2005 August 23 (UTC)


 * I think the real question is: do we need a one-stop-shop for all of the names, or should we (as Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas had been doing) just list the groups into which the smaller tribes fall, and get detailed on their pages. Think of this in terms of duplication of information. If you have a page that details, for example, the Aleut, and then that page lists the List of Alaska Native Tribal Entities and locations such as the Pribilof Islands, then you have a much better way of organizing information and keeping it where it is most relevant. You can list information that is general to the Aleut at their page, and then have the Native Village of Saint Paul Island, Alaska on its own page.


 * Having one giant list doesn't really tell anyone anything, and makes research harder, not easier.... -Harmil 11:52, 23 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I think that is a good question. Lists of names have been published in various books, so there is a precedent for lists. But, since Wikipedia is searchable, is a list unnecessary? Firstly, I wonder how good the searching capabilities are: if it is good then maybe a list is not needed. My second thought is that if there is a list, reader (and potential contributors) can then see what is information is lacking. Thirdly, a search may find a name in the list that doesnt appear anywhere else in Wikipedia. (of course this makes me think about all the other lists that are so popular here: why?)


 * Giant lists do tell us names. As many are aware, there is often a very significant amount of synonymy (and alternate spellings) with respect to the names of indigenous peoples (in fact, this often makes research difficult, especially to newcomers). A giant list could provide a way to figure out who a given name refers to. So, its function could be indexical. Maybe this is useful?


 * it would be nice if the lists created were highly organized. One thing I see about the Aleut case above (but not necessarily for others) is that not all Alaskan peoples are Aleut. What about a hierarchy like this: homebase > Aleut > Aleut tribes > Pribilof Islands? I see this hierarchy above as a combination of 2 kinds of groupings.


 * We have two main ways to make large groupings: (1) geo-cultural (i.e. by culture area), (2) political (i.e. by country-state). Both of these are of value, the geo-cultural way seems obvious (to me), the political way is good so that someone can see what governments say and to whom they do what. Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas follows (1). You know, I dont see any real discussion of culture areas in Wikipedia, at in this list they are mentioned. Until an article about this is written, the list does list groups of people who share cultural traits. This is useful. (Handbook of North American Indians has volumes by culture area as do most other works.)


 * I think that in the main homebase list the inclusion of smaller divisions will probably make the list hard to manage. But, it may not be easy to maintain these distinctions of smaller vs. larger divisions (I'm thinking of South America especially). Which groups do we consider to be appropriate for the highest division?


 * anyway, just a few thoughts. peace – ishwar  (speak)  07:13, 2005 August 24 (UTC)

In prep for the work being done at Native Americans, I've decided to be bold and simplify the problem. There is now only one list: List of Native American tribes, which though arguably redundant with information on this page, is at least just one page. I've redirected all of the other alphabetically named pages to there. There might be some unique information on those other pages, and if so, I ask people to salvage it from the history and insert it into List of Native American tribes so that we can decide what to do with it. What I do not want is people editing several different articles, further diverging them from any common roots, and that is why I did what I did. Please forgive me if this is annoying, and trust me that I understand, but the potential workload of reversing the problem was only growing larger by the day. -Harmil 21:39, 22 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Ooops, let me clarify that. There is only one of the new lists. The lists like List of Native American Tribal Entities are still there, because their information (who is recognized by the U.S., and under what tribal names) is still unique, and useful enough to have in one place. -Harmil 21:42, 22 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I am intensely aware of the fact that I am stumbling into an area where I am not very knowlegeable and where a lot of work has been done by people who are. I reverted User:Harmil's redirects of the List of Indian Tribes A-E series only because his edit summaries read "This page is a duplicate..." which appeared to me not to be the case.  For example,


 * A’Ukre, → Kayapó.
 * Ababá, Tupian, rio Corumbiara, Mato Grosso.
 * Abaeté,
 * Abaré,
 * Abatihe,
 * Abenaki. Tribes: Amaseconti, Androscoggin, Kennebec (Norridgewock), Maliseet, Ouarastegouiak, Passamaquoddy, Patsuiket, Penobscot, Pigwacket (Pequawket), Rocameca, Sokoki, Wewenoc (Wawenoc).
 * Abitana-Waninân (Huanian, Abitana-Huanyam, Huanham, Huanyam, Abitâna-Wanyam),
 * Aboba,
 * Acarapis


 * from List of Indian Tribes A-E is all missing before the first entry on List of Native American tribes; there is much more of the kind.


 * Now, having read the foregoing discussion, I understand some of Harmil's intent (which I take to be that ideally, all of this would go into Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas), but that article also appears to be missing the material above. But if Harmil and ishwar agree that all of the material in the List of Indian Tribes A-E & co. that is missing from List of Native American tribes is unneeded, I will take your word for it (though I remain puzzled by the contention). If there is any feeling that the missing material should be saved, I would be willing to work on merging the lists, though as I've indicated, I would be working essentially mechanically, without much knowlege of the tribes involved. -- Mwanner | Talk 20:37, 23 September 2005 (UTC)


 * First of all, thank you for taking an interest in these pages which need it so badly! I'm not saying that the information that you point out is well represented (or even, in some cases, represented at all!) What I'm saying is that we need to pick a structure into which the information will be read by the user. Right now, we have 3 primary sources of information: Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas, List of Indian Tribes A-E & co., and List of Native American tribes. We need to reduce that to one, and in order to do that, I've taken the first step by reducing it to two. We have not lost any information from Wikipedia's history, only from the flow of readership, so we do need to perform the merge.


 * So, why would I make such an agressive change? Because people were making changing in 3 places, making the final edit increasingly harder over time. Mwanner, if you want to start merging information from List of Indian Tribes A-E & co., just go into their histories and go for it. I'm thrilled to see that work done.


 * I am busy right now on the disambiguations of links to Native Americans, but once I'm done I'll be turning my efforts to these pages, and trying to help create a true classification with some more detail on the major regional groups, and some nice pages for the groups within those regions so that this page isn't just a big list, but a real article. Anyone who wishes to help is welcome! -Harmil 04:29, 25 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks, that makes sense. I think, though, that I had better stick with areas I'm more familiar with. -- Mwanner | Talk 14:02, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Classification or list?
This article starts out well. It lists the major classifications of the arctic regions. However, for places like California (shouldn't that be the United States Southwest in general?) it then seems to bog itself down into listing individual tribes. See above for rationale on why that might not be ideal. For the most part, I would think it would make sense to par down this list to just the major groups in each region as has ben done with the arctic, and then write detailed articles for each of those regions that list the tribes that are included.

Otherwise, this whole article just becomes a list, and that's not nearly as useful as the title suggests. -Harmil 12:18, 29 August 2005 (UTC)


 * hi.


 * California is usually considered a separate culture area that is not a subarea of another area.


 * The Arctic is reducible because it is not as diverse as California. (If you follow linguistics, you can reduce the Arctic to just Eskimo & Aleut. But, you cannot do this to California where you have to recognize several significantly different groups.)


 * For the most, the article does list only major groups. But, what does this mean anyway? Can you make explicit what you mean by major.


 * Reduction:
 * If we parallel the groups in Europe, rather than list Swedes and English as separate groups, we could reduce them to Germanic; and also Romance for the most of the others. Do you suggest something similar? If we follow this European reduction, we could reduce the Subarctic to mostly 2 (linguistic) groups: Athabaskan, Algonquian. (but, of course, this is not possible in California.)


 * Perhaps you can give an example of a reduction?


 * peace – ishwar  (speak)  16:20, 2005 August 29 (UTC)


 * Well, here I am butting in. I think the idea of classification is (1) to find the tribe you are looking for and (2) to show the ways the different tribes are related. And shouldn't we be calling them "nations" not "tribes"?


 * If you're looking alphabetically, there could be a simple alphabetical list of every tribe.


 * If you're looking in terms of linguistic affiliations, there would be another list based on the best information on language groups. For instance the Algonkian speakers are not geographically contiguous, so that list would be different from a list based on geographical or political boundaries. This way if a reader was looking for speakers of Algonian or Ute-Aztecan, many tribes would be found that woudn't be obvious from a strictly alphabetical list of course.


 * If you're looking for tribes based on their locality, the more traditional culture areas would work: Northwest Coast, California, Great Basin, Plateau, etc. And then the economies would more or less follow. However, it might be better to follow rainfall distribution and vegetation distribution and that would be an even closer match, as in Driver's maps of Native North American tribes and their environments.


 * To go state by state is not so good. The California Chemehuevis would then be in a separate list from their close relatives the Nevada Paiutes and Shoshones, and the Bannocks of Idaho.


 * There are always exceptions, no matter what approach you take. The Pueblos and Navajos are neighbors but their ecology is very different and so are their languages, as far as I know. I hope this is useful.--samivel 21:21, 7 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I think to do the job well, it's necessary to have all three. For example Comanches can understand Paiutes because they belong to the same language group although their ecologies are different: the former were buffalo hunters and the latter were Great Basin hunter gatherers. Of course you know all this.

Goajiro
The Goajiro people need to be added to the list in the appropriate region of South America. &mdash; Fingers-of-Pyrex 12:07, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Redundant lists
Ok, so here is what we have to merge:
 * Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas (this article)
 * List of Native American tribes

And more information is buried in the pre-redirect histories of these pages:
 * Tribes from A-to-Z
 * List of Indian Tribes A-E
 * List of Indian Tribes F-L
 * List of Indian Tribes M-R
 * List of Indian Tribes M-Z
 * List of South American Tribes
 * List of South American Tribes B
 * List of South American Tribes C
 * List of South American Tribes D

And more information is available from these sources which are not redundant, but could feed the process:
 * List of Native American Tribal Entities
 * List of Alaska Native Tribal Entities
 * Category:Indigenous peoples of the Americas

Thanks to ishwar for helping me to find all of these. My initial plan is to Par this page down to very high-level groupings (as has been done for the section on Alaska) and start creating any articles that are needed for those groups and also making sure that those articles contained the list of tribes included or referred to one. Right now, I'm thinking that at least the U.S. and Mexico should probably be broken up by language families, as that is a traditional way that antropologists refer to tribal super-structures. Any objections? That would give us:


 * Algonquian
 * Andean-Equatorial
 * Arawakan
 * Athabaskan
 * Caddoan
 * Chibchan
 * Eskimo-Aleut
 * Ge-Pano-Carib
 * Gulf
 * Hokan
 * Iroquoian
 * Kiowa-Tanoan
 * Mayan
 * Mixe-Zoque
 * Muskogean
 * Oto-Manguean
 * Penutian
 * Salishan
 * Siouan
 * Uto-Aztecan
 * Wakashan

And the isolates:


 * Andoque
 * Camsa
 * Cayubaba
 * Cayuse
 * Haida (nominally part of Na-Dene, i.e. Athapaskan, but not Athapaskan, and nobody's ever proved the existence of Na-Dene anyway)
 * Itonama
 * Keres
 * Kootenai
 * Mura-Pirah
 * Paez
 * Pankararu
 * Puelche
 * Puinave
 * Purepecha
 * Quileute
 * Tol
 * Tonkawa
 * Ticuna
 * Trumai
 * Tsimane
 * Tuxa
 * Wappo
 * Warao
 * Vilela
 * Yamana
 * Yuchi
 * Yuki
 * Yuracare
 * Zuni

From there we can break down as far as we like, but we'll be avoiding the horrid trap of trying to put every tribe in a single article. -Harmil 04:29, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I am not sure I agree. Certainly an alphabetical "List" article is very useful at this point due to the huge nuber of red links. That article should contain all named tribes/bands/groups. But I think the "classification" article should also. It provides me no information if, when I come here with the name of a tribe to try to find what "culture group" it belongs to, there are no tribes of any sort listed here. Realistically as you have noted, that sort of infomation is currently rarely noted in individual tribe articles and we have fewer articles than redlinks anyway. Rmhermen 14:29, 11 October 2005 (UTC)


 * just a note about the linguistics of the list above:


 * there are many more isolates/unclassified langs than what are mentioned above. there about 100 families & 130 isolates/unclassifieds. i have been working on a list of families & isolates in the indigenous languages of the Americas article. it is not finished yet, but it is looking better. after i finish extracting info from Campbell (1997) & Kaufman (1990, 1994), i will compare with what the Ethnologue has. maybe it wont have many newly discovered langs. anyway, what is in this article are for-sure (as of 1997) genetic units. all of the other so-called families need more work to determine their validity.


 * so... Andean-Equatorial is not a family & neither is Andean or Equatorial. Ge-Pano-Carib is unproven - the inner branches of Cariban have not even been figured out (if i recall correctly). Gulf has been abandoned mostly (at least for now). Hokan is not really there yet - Sapir's Hokan is definitely too speculative. Penutian is getting there (Tsimshianic is probably out though), but it still hasnt been demonstrated. Greenberg's Penutian, however, is definitely out. peace – ishwar  (speak)  05:13, 1 November 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't see these lists as redundant. Lists of tribes/groups sorted by various criteria (alphabetical, regional, linguistic, etc.) are all useful, and it's not like a list takes up that much memory space.  There's no reason to limit the number of lists.  The proposed list sounds superior, but the cultural/regional list still provides helpful information.--Bkwillwm 00:07, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Ten groups?
The U.S./Canada section says that they are divided into ten groups and then goes on to list nine. So are they classified into nine groups or are we missing one group entirely? Rmhermen 18:47, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I second this. What happened to the Southwest? (Apache, Chiricahua Apache, Havasupai, Hopi, Laguna, Mescalero, Mohave, Navajo, Navajo Diné, Pima, Pueblo, Zuni etc.)--Lizbrw 23:45, 25 February 2006 (UTC)lizbrw


 * It was deleted by a vandal and nobody noticed, that's what. - Nat Krause(Talk!) 20:47, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Removing dialect and language refs
Not all done yet; noticed this while tweaking the Northwest section; this is not a language-classification page, but a people page, presumably ethnographic divisions; which can cross over to language, but dialects certainly do not (generally) mean a major shift in culture/identity; also smaller placenames/groups that are part of larger groups have been deleted, e.g. Fountain, which is part of St'at'imc.Skookum1 02:34, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

1-up vs 2-up
some sections of this article are 1-up (single column); other sections are 2-up (list is split in two in left/right columns). I think the reader would be better served by having all sections 1-up: the lists would look neater. Your ideas? Thanks. Hmains 18:46, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Define Indigenous and Native or else merge
Only whites use the term "Native Americans." It is insulting to many Indians including me. We have nothing to do with Amerigo Vespucci and nevr will. Of course these articles should be merged under the banner here. --67.72.98.87 17:26, 26 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I think the term "Native American" was introduced to avoid the term "Indian" which is clearly misleading. Actually, I have heard a white American who reacted to the term for quite another reason, because he himself was born on the continent and therefore thought he as well was Native American. I don´t think the term "Native American" implies that the indigenous people on the continent have anything to do with Amerigo Vespucci. It simply means that they are the original inhabitants on the continent that now is known by the name America. From an indigenous Norwegian --Oddeivind (talk) 21:07, 21 January 2011 (UTC)


 * "Indian" is an insult to the native Americans, as they have nothing to do with India. The name is eurocentric, as it derived from a European misunderstanding. I agree that "native American" is far better. It does not mean that they have anything to do with Amerigo Vespucci. It is simply a fact that they are the original population of the continent named after this man. "Native American" is simply a term meant to honour this fact. --84.210.127.117 (talk) 07:33, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
 * This discussion dates back to 2006. The article's current title has "indigenous peoples of the Americas" and there is no current proposal to change the need, so no need to hash out another semantics discussion here. -Uyvsdi (talk) 17:04, 12 August 2011 (UTC)Uyvsdi

-There are so many redundant lists, I'd merge these duplicate lists as I see a whole lot of overlap. Here's some ideas:

-"Native American" Tribes - is the first Name I would hunt for in "search". I would never think to hunt for the words "indigenous peoples of the americas" in a million years so would need to be directed there: I like the format of the Indigenous Peoples List much better because it breaks down and sorts groups by region but the first thing a person might search for and get more hits, is "Native American Tribes" especially young people and students doing research.

--if decided to keep the Native and Indigenous separate, make clear what each one means at top: i.e. what qualifies a group to be indigenous, not just natives. If there is no distinction, they are completely the same and you can kill one with a redirect to the other list.

--logistically start with Indigenous page as the "master page". Make a new heading for groups at the bottom called "tribes that still need to be sorted by region" and put all the native american tribes from the native american tribe lists that exists already that need sorting and merging. Hope that helps. goldenrowley, 3:56, 29 Jul 2006

-- native americans are only organized in tribes in the united states, every where else the affiliation is loser and is infact better described as "indigenous peoples". I second the merger.Maunus 07:59, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Articles by Area
Whether or not this gets merged, the article Plains Indians shows that this in enough to write about each culture area separately, and I plan to create articles for the Sub-Arctic and perhaps other. Kevlar67 21:58, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Preposal to merge with Culture areas of the Americas
Since it seems to be a duplicate. --Kevlar (talk • contribs) 04:36, 16 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Support yes they look the same ....Buzzzsherman (talk) 06:18, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Also Support. Perhaps "Cultural areas" can be the introduction to the classifications of individual cultures. -Uyvsdi (talk) 08:06, 16 December 2009 (UTC)Uyvsdi