It's some combination of pre-contact range and current tribal lands--see the differences between "Cherokee" and "Cherokee (Oklahoma)". Maybe points in-between, but maybe not--they have the Lenape lands at contact, but AFAICT nothing for their migration westwards across Pennsylvania and Ohio before they ended up on reservations in Oklahoma and Ontario.
It seems a little broad and maybe poorly sourced--check out the huge range of the Osage, especially the eastern part. It includes precisely the Ohio River valley, not including the valleys of its major tributaries. I suspect someone read the Wikipedia page that says "Studies of their traditions and language show that they were part of a group of Dhegian-Siouan speaking people who lived in the Ohio River valley area" and extrapolated from there, not seeing the next clause, "Extending into present-day Kentucky."
A lot of the data a project like this needs is going to be fuzzy at best and should properly come with caveats that a single map with hard borders can't really communicate well.
I love maps, though this one was a bit frustrating. I wish it'd hyperlink its sources, so Concession 17 would link to the treaty (or at least have a better name than Concession ##).
In the US, there is often a lot of money at stake in determinations of where a tribe's "ancestral land" (itself not all that clear a concept) was, because tribes can petition to use that as a basis for citing an off-reservation casino. My one Indian law case involved a tribe whose ancestral tribal lands, according to an anthropologist the tribe paid and who was in no possible way biased by that fact, happened to have a small peninsula sticking out that overlapped barely with a major freeway exit. So without being sure of where this info comes from I would treat it with extreme caution.
"siting" not "citing" of course. Where is the goddamn edit button.
Yeah, this map is sort of a mishmash of different sources covering different periods. Not very useful or reliable even given that putting this sort of thing on a map with clearly delineated boundaries is misleading to begin with.
Agree that this map is not reliable in its current form. The author states as much, citing to the difficulty of defining the question, but, a vague disclaimer without offering definitions about how the author is going to put plots to paper is problematic, making the information, I think, useless, as opposed to a work in progress.
Maybe I'm missing information, but there's no definition in which I can imagine the plotting of the Pacific Northwest to be accurate -- Washington state with only the Yakima & Wenatchee plotted. It can't be first contact or current reservations.
I'm guessing the map is someone playing with mapping without much data.
If you like maps, I am liking these terrible maps though maybe not as much as I like the maps without New Zealand.
My favorite was the bear attack one.
I guess Metis presents its own problems.
I hadn't really understood the Ktunaxa people's historic range until we took a drive to Banff (and just into Jasper) last month. It's kind of silly to end the Nimipuu at the Bitterroot divide. They regularly hunted buffalo on the plains, even if they didn't live there. They told Lewis & Clark about Rogers Pass in 1806, which was a big damn deal.
OK, L&C Pass, which is 5 miles away from Rogers, but the point is that they knew about the shortcut to Great Falls, future home of mermaids.
8: I sadly have to admit I laughed at the "Population Per Capita" of Kosovo.
(You folks did read abut the mermaids in the NYT yesterday, right? They're hiring!)
The "What Country is Across the Ocean" map is actually very interesting but not terrible.
I really liked your Maps w/o New Zealand link Thorn!
Yeah, the data for New Mexico on this map would be liable to start several wars, if anyone ever tried to claim accuracy.
Here's a beautiful old map
http://dcc.newberry.org/system/artifacts/740/original/Powell-Map-of-Indian-Languages.jpg
http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/the_vault/2016/02/22/LgMapOfLinguisticStocks.jpg
Here's a Slate article about it:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2016/02/22/john_wesley_powell_s_late_19th_century_map_of_native_american_linguistic.html
Here's a nice looking one from 1967, that looks nice and is maybe clearer
http://www.emersonkent.com/images/indian_tribes.jpg
Here's a modern one where each tribe gets its own color
http://roundtripticket.me/native-american-map-of-north-america.html/native-american-map-of-north-america-for
I don't think any of them are a snapshot of a particular year or era unfortch
If you superimposed a map of drainage basins I think you'd see they correpspond to each other pretty well.
I don't think any of them are a snapshot of a particular year or era unfortch
No, they're not, primarily because to do such a map rigorously would mean either leaving about half of the continent blank (which half depends on what date you were going for) or making a lot of wild guesses based on essentially no information. Maps like this are typically composites of locations at the time of first contact with Europeans, so they are best read as having a temporal dimension running approximately from east to west and covering about 300 years.
It's strange to think of the mighty Elkhorn River as a major dividing line between language groups, but I would guess what that really means is that everybody decided the Pawnee could have the land where there was no actual dirt you could farm on.
I imagine the "insufficient data" parts of the Northeast are because of the Beaver Wars having wiped out the history/people too fast for Europeans to have had contact.
Chewed away the family trees, as it were.
23: This is why you don't get to wars.
It was supposed to say "name wars" but a beaver ate it.
This is probably the time and place for my confession. I was over 30 when I discovered that New Zealand was south of Australia. I think this was possible because I learned where countries were from the globe that was always in my room, and from the angle I looked at it I never saw New Zealand at the bottom, and somehow decided that New Guinea was New Zealand. I was at a party and there was a couple from New Zealand. I don't remember how the subject came up, but I do remember that I was so confident about my geographical knowledge, that I was about to start arguing with them about where there country was.
I once met somebody from Manhattan who didn't know where Connecticut was. (They thought it was between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.)
That would explain why Connecticut is so damp.
28: bad news on that. New Zealand isn't south of Australia. You're thinking of Tasmania or possibly Antarctica...
It's further south than Australia, for the most part. But yes, more east than south.
You're not the only person who has the New Guinea/Zealand confusion; we went to NZ on our holiday and a friend thought that meant New Guinea. Bougainville is a bit too adventurous for me.
New Zealand is strange because Gondor is north of the Shire.
Maybe you guys could compromise on "southeast" or "eastsoutheast." Blessed are the peacemakers.
An ex-girlfriend lived in Berkeley, CA, and had been there for 8 years when I met her. She didn't know that the San Francisco Bay emptied into the Pacific Ocean. Now a minor celebrity in an intellectual field. So, Peep, there is hope.
When I first went to college in Michigan, I thought Chicago was on the other side of us. In that fuzzy, not thinking directly about it - I'm sure I could have derived the truth if I'd thought about it systematically - but it was loosely categorized in my head as something east-coast-ish. And my roommate for the first week was from Chicago, so our first conversation was full of laden pauses while I scrambled to keep up.
It could be an endorheic lake. Hence the salt flats.
I think she thought it was some kind of salty lake. This was not the only geographical error.
37: Lots of people confuse Chicago with Toledo.
We were on a road trip amd I asked her to look at the map to navigate. "Oh wow! The Pacific ocean is right there!"
Well, she was absolutely right about that.
I just figured out that Lady Bird isn't a biopic about President Johnson's wife.
Early in my stay here I was walking in the government district and was surprised to see the Roc Merchant Marine Agency (or something similar). WTF? I thought. Why would they have merchant mariners? Then some other part of my brain said, "Because it's a fucking island". Somehow I'd mentally filed it as "diplomatic oddity" and thus in the same category as Switzerland, the Vatican and Andorra.
Switzerland has a considerable merchant marine. Basel is connected to the ocean.
I'm in agreement with Sherlock Holmes about knowledge of the natural world.
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
44: Yes. Can it be a coincidence that Greta Gerwig came up with this name for the protagonist of her movie at the same as Jennifer Jason Leigh is playing the part of Lady Bird Johnson in a movie?
If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you just haven't been spending enough time keeping up with Hollywood gossip.
I'm pretty sure Sherlock was at least aware of the Atlantic Ocean.
28: The big thing about this wasn't my ignorance really -- it was that I was so sure of my knowledge when I was completely wrong. That was an instructive experience.
You could always try explaining feminism to women.
I just figured out that Lady Bird isn't a biopic about President Johnson's wife.
It does seem odd that an Oscar favorite isn't a biopic. Logical mistake.
I just found out "Legion" isn't a TV adaptation of the movie "Legion".
best read as having a temporal dimension running approximately from east to west and covering about 300 years.
This is a very helpful framework.
