- This article is about the large number of peoples speaking Algonquian languages. For the Algonquin of Quebec and the Ottawa Valley, who are one of these peoples, see Algonquin.
Algonquian Indians are one of the most populous and widespread North American Native groups, with tribes originally numbering in the hundreds, and hundreds of thousands who still identify with various Algonquian peoples. This grouping consists of peoples that speak Algonquian languages.
Before European contact, most Algonquians lived by hunting and fishing, although quite a few supplemented their diet by cultivating corn, beans, squash, and (particularly among the Ojibwe) wild rice.
At the time of the first European settlements in North America, Algonquian tribes occupied what is now New England, New Jersey, southeastern New York, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, all of Canada east of the Rocky Mountains, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and were occasionally present in Kentucky. They were most concentrated in the New England region. The homeland of the Algonquian peoples is not known. At the time of the European arrival, the hegemonic Iroquois federation was regularly at war with their Algonquian neighbours, forcing them to settle in regions unoccupied by Iroquois.
For about two centuries, Algonquians provided the main obstacles to the spread of Euro-American settlers, who concluded hundreds of peace treaties with them. Cornstalk, Tecumseh and Pontiac were all leaders who belonged to Algonquian nations.
Algonquian tribes of the New England area include Mahican, Pequot, Narragansett, Wampanoag, Massachusett, and Penacook, Passamaquoddy. The Abenaki tribe is located in Maine and eastern Quebec. These tribes practiced some agriculture. The Maliseet of Maine, Quebec and New Brunswick, and the Micmac tribes of the Canadian Maritime provinces lived primarily on fishing. Further north are the Betsiamites, Atikamekw, Algonkin and Montagnais/Naskapi (Innu). The Beothuk people of Newfoundland are also believed to have been Algonquians, but they disappeared in the early 1800s and few records of their language or culture remain. In the west, Ojibwe/Chippewa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and a variety of Cree groups lived in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Upper Michigan, Western Ontario and the Canadian Prairies. The Arapaho, Blackfoot and Cheyenne are also indigenous to the Great Plains. In the Midwest lived the Shawnee, Kickapoo, Menominee, Miami, and Sac and Fox, many of whom have since been displaced over great distances through Indian Removal. In the mid- and south-Atlantic are the traditional homes of the Powhatan, Lumbee, Nanticoke, Lenape, Munsee and Mohegan peoples.
The tribal names used to identify individual groups of Algonquian peoples and their languages are often misleading. Even today, intermarriage and tight intercommunity alliances are common across the Algonquian peoples. Their languages are also quite similar. Across Canada, Cree speaking people may be able to understand each other with little difficulty, and the Ojibwe language is close enough to the Western Cree languages to remain partially understandable. These divisions have often been imposed by European efforts to manage native peoples, and to give them a European-style political identity better suited to the colonisers' ends. Within these communities, identities were often more fungible.
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