Political boundaries are fluid over time. Unlike a river or a mountain range, they are merely human constructs. This is an important truth that children should learn.
This map will help students understand where (in general) the people of several major Native American nations were living some four hundred years ago when Europeans began visiting this area with increasing frequency. Youngsters will see that quite a few different Native American cultures were coexisting in this part of the Northeastern Forestlands – before the epidemics and tragic wars that arrived in the years following European colonization.
Fortunately, many people with Native American ancestry continue to live in this region. While some are not particularly aware of their genetic connections, others are keenly attuned to this heritage (genetic and cultural) and continue to organize and propel their world-view, values, and /or lifeways into the future of these Forestlands that had been their home for so many years.
The map offered here can be used in many ways. For example, it can serve to exercise students’ skills at deciphering texts and images describing spatial position: in other words, foundational map reading. In terms of cultural competencies, it can also help build their knowledge of this region’s history, and acquaint them with names used by early European chroniclers (and later academics) to describe important political and cultural entities that were flourishing here in the years just before European colonization. (Of course, indigenous peoples of various cultures were here for perhaps 12,000 years – long before the ships of Norse, French and British immigrants began to arrive.) This map could also serve as a prompt for discussions about current controversies regarding Native American ownership, titles, and rights to the NE forestlands and waters (acknowledging that some of these terms and themes may be expressions of a non-Indigenous conceptual framing / mindset, and that deeper questions regarding the relationships between all humans and their bioregions – and planetary commons – deserve to be addressed. )
Further study and conversation is encouraged. We hope this map can be helpful to youngsters as they develop deeper, more nuanced, and informed appreciations of the complexities and ethical implications of this region’s history.
Here’s another way to access the PDF of the map: Native American Homelands EB