Tribal Names of the Americas

Book excerpt: Scholars have long worked to identify the names of tribes and other groupings in the Americas, a task made difficult by the sheer number of indigenous groups and the many names that have been passed down only through oral tradition. This book is a compendium of tribal names in all their variants--from North, Central and South America--collected from printed sources. Because most of these original sources reproduced words that had been encountered only orally, there is a great deal of variation. Organized alphabetically, this book collates these variations, traces them to the spellings and forms that have become standardized, and supplies see and see also references. Each main entry includes tribal name, the "parent group" or ancestral tribe, original source for the tribal name, and approximate location of the name in the original source material.