Tribes (Native American)
Native American tribes represent a diverse array of indigenous social groups in North America, characterized by shared names, territories, ancestry, and communal ties. The term "tribe" has European origins and is often seen as reductive, failing to capture the complexity and variety of indigenous societies, many of which did not fit the conventional concept of a tribe. These groups often operated through unique social structures, which could include clans, bands, or even larger confederations, each with its own governance and cultural practices.
Historically, the imposition of the term "tribe" by colonizers has led to misunderstandings and stereotypes of Native American peoples as primitive or uncivilized. In contemporary contexts, many indigenous communities seek recognition as federally recognized tribes to access legal protections and benefits, navigating complex political landscapes influenced by treaties and government relations. The definition of tribal membership can vary significantly among tribes, often involving factors such as ancestry and blood quantum, which can conflict with traditional practices of identity based on language or clan affiliation.
Understanding Native American tribes requires a recognition of their rich cultural diversity and the historical and political challenges they face in maintaining their identities and rights within a broader societal framework.
Tribes (Native American)
The word “tribe” has deep roots in Indo-European languages and cultures. In Indo-European the word tre refers to trees and the way they branch. This later became the word tri, meaning one-third, or division into three parts. The word bus refers to “bush,” or branching plant. In Latin, tribus was used in reference to the three groups—Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan—who united to form Rome. The original term comes from the Etruscans. It has come into modern usage through French and Middle English derivations and was carried into North America by colonial peoples.
Definitions
This term describes various human social groups who share a common name, territory, ancestry, and feeling of community. Peoples with similar customs and cultural, linguistic, and religious homogeneity are thought by Western Europeans and European Americans to be tribes. In some areas populated by groups considered tribes, people traveled in nomadic groups loosely bound by family ties. In others, they settled and established their tribes on a clan basis; in still other regions the power structure was based on a village or community system.
Some social scientists consider a tribe to be an organized band or group of bands who have shared means of resolving disputes and making communal decisions and possess a written language. A tribe is also thought to be a self-sufficient group of people living and working together but producing little or no surplus goods or services.
A tribe is larger than a family or a band yet smaller than a chiefdom, kingdom, or empire. Some scholars say the term refers to early stages in the development of human political systems and nation-states. This assumes that a tribe lacks a state apparatus, civil government, and the complex political organization commonly associated with the more easily recognized governmental forms of chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires.
The word “tribe” can have a negative connotation and is often used to refer to any group of people considered “primitive” by others—groups who live a “simple” life of traveling, hunting, migrating, marrying, and meeting for ceremonies and who share a common dialect, customs, culture, and worldview. Such peoples are generally lacking in advanced technology and are organized in ways considered “uncivilized” by citizens of nation-states.
Some of the things that bind any human community together include family and kinship ties; shared beliefs about self, group, and their origins; and the best ways to care for and relate to the environment. The variety of types of social, political, and religious organization regulated through ritualistic, governmental, and other institutional forms are numerous and diverse. Any people who share a language, social structure, worldview, and territory can be assumed to qualify as a tribe.
Tribes and the American Experience
Some indigenous American tribes were so loosely organized that no tribal unit is said to have existed. Their lives were thought to “border on anarchy.” They were nomadic or migratory. They had no Native American secret societies, tradition of hereditary nobility, complex clan structures, or settled places of constant habitation. They were small groups, often called “bands,” who shared a common identity because of their common presence and activities.
Some assembled into duly constituted independent states when they gathered all their numbers together, while other groups entered into an even higher organic state by confederating with neighboring tribes, (a level of organization that could qualify them as nations). Others forced many smaller tribes to take part in the formation and maintenance of an empire, as among the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas.
Tribe, in its European denotation, signifies only a political unit, whereas the actual diversity among American Indian peoples of organizational forms indicates a wide variety of complex social expressions of the communal uniting of personal and environmental conceptions. Social relations depended on the self-evident order of nature and a people’s place in it.
American Indian peoples traditionally had no commonly agreed-upon concept of “tribe.” They were generally animists, meaning that they believed everything to be alive and related; all things were defined by their relationship to all other things. They had many varieties of Native American clans, lineage systems, kinship groups, and social structures. Each group had a name for itself in its own language, most often a word that meant “the people” or “human beings.” For example, the Tsalagi (Cherokee) word Junwiya, the Navajo word Diné, and the Nez Perce word Nimipuu all mean “the people.”
Colonial Europeans often thought of all peoples unlike themselves as primitives and therefore as “tribes.” It was their tendency, because of the categorical and reductionist strains of their thinking and languages, to reduce the diversity of indigenous American peoples to a general category of “primitives” or “tribes.” They did not recognize or understand the communities and peoples they encountered in their drive to colonize the Americas and to develop new sources of raw materials, generate income for the European monarchies, and procure converts to Christian churches. They generally looked upon native peoples in the Americas as savage, barbaric, uncivilized, primitive, and worthy only of extermination or exploitation.
As the United States developed into a nation, these abstract generalizations were projected onto all Indigenous peoples who organized themselves in ways not recognizable to Anglo-Europeans. Indigenous tribal peoples in Hawaii and the Philippines, for example, were viewed as primitives who needed to be controlled or exterminated either by force of arms or by coercive cultural assimilation.
Each tribal community in the Americas is the product of distinctive conditions, circumstances, and experiences from which the community derives the shape of its culture and the form of its identity. There were originally thousands of unique peoples in the Americas before contact with Europeans. Only after contact with Europeans did it eventually become a legal necessity to define oneself in terms of tribal affiliation.
Modern, Legal and Political Considerations
Many indigenous peoples consider the term “tribe” to be offensive, seeing its use as a typical European attempt to justify “civilizing,” forcibly assimilating, or exterminating them. Yet, they also realize that they must struggle today to receive and maintain recognition as “federally recognized tribes” in order to receive protections under the law and fulfillment of treaty rights and benefits.
Alternative terms such as “ethnicity,” “minority group,” and “identity group” have been suggested, but any such redefinition involves political (and economic) issues. “Tribe” is a term with distinct political connotations in the United States. American Indian peoples have a constitutionally mandated relationship with the government as defined by treaties and other agreements between recognized Indian nations and their enrolled citizens. This is called the federal-Indian trust relationship and is carried out through various intra- and intergovernmental contacts and institutions. Tribes’ inherent, although limited, sovereignty and inalienable right to self-determination is thereby supposed to be assured. At the same time, the federal government’s duties and obligations to modern tribes are spelled out.
For these reasons, federally recognized American Indian tribes traditionally did not seek civil rights. They believed, and many still believe today, that the US government and Native Americans are best served through the fulfillment of treaties rather than the passage of laws in the interest of immigrant minority groups. There is considerable money and power at stake; thus, what tribe a person is enrolled in and what factors determine membership in an Indian tribal nation become matters of great political and social import. In the United States, one cannot receive benefits as a beneficiary in the federal-Indian trust relationship unless one is “an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe.” In other words, an individual must be a citizen of a legally and politically defined “Indian nation” with rights under federal law.
Exactly what defines membership in a federally recognized tribe varies from one group to another. Ancestry, blood quantum, and acclamation are all legally sound bases used to support claims to tribal membership. These bases go against traditional methods of identification such as language, clan membership, and religion. The process of imposing Western political and legal standards tends to erode traditional forms of organization.
Legal definitions are of great import today. Tribes are not states but “dependent” nations with limited tribal sovereignty and an inherent right to self-determination and self-government, even if the specific governmental forms are imposed from without. Many tribal groups maintain their traditional forms of governing themselves, while creating federally recognized nation-state frameworks that allow them to participate in nation-to-nation relationships. This is essential to the preservation of cultural integrity on the one hand and to the fulfillment of treaty obligations on the other.
The concept or term “tribe” is thus ambiguous and represents a superimposition of European modes of viewing and defining the cultural, social, and political organization of indigenous peoples. It is a term of convenience used to designate all North American Indian peoples, even though only about half of them actually had any form of tribal organization. The indigenous peoples of North America lived in a wide spectrum of identity groups, including families, clans, bands, villages, tribes, chiefdoms, and empires. Their social and political systems were diverse and distinctive; they were expressions of each group’s unique adaptations to the many geographical and environmental conditions evident in North America from prehistoric times to the present.
Bibliography
Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. Pantheon Books, 1984.
Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. University of Minnesota Press, 1980.
Fried, Morton H. The Notion of Tribe. Cummings, 1975.
Gluckman, Max. Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society. Reprint, Blackwell, 1977.
Sahlins, Marshall D. Tribesmen. Prentice Hall, 1968.
"Tribal Nations and the United States: An Introduction." National Congress of American Indians, 2024, archive.ncai.org/about-tribes. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
"Tribes." US Dept. of the Interior, www.doi.gov/international/what-we-do/tribes. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
"What is a Tribe?" Milwaukee Public Museum, 2022, www.mpm.edu/index.php/content/wirp/ICW-08. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.