Great Plains Tribes

The Great Plains is a geographic region that includes parts of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Environmentally speaking, the climate is one of extremes, including excessive heat and cold and other forceful weather patterns. The region's terrain is comprised of mostly treeless, semiarid plateaus with seemingly endless short-grass vistas. Although modern agriculture and ranching have transformed the area, this region was once thought to have supported more than 10 percent (two million) of the total Native American population. By the time the early explorers William Clark and Meriwether Lewis visited the region in 1803, however, deadly epidemics such as smallpox had wiped out most of the indigenous communities living there.

The image of the tepee-dwelling Plains Indian warrior riding his horse and wearing buckskin clothing and a feathered headdress is the dominant stereotype of American Indians in the United States. But this image does not accurately represent Native Americans as a whole nor the numerous tribes inhabiting the Great Plains. There are six different linguistic groups represented among the indigenous Plains people. They lived in earthern lodges, woven-grass lodges, or buffalo-skin lodges (the stereotypical tepee). At the time of European contact, many Plains people were nomadic big game hunters, while others were agriculturalists living in semipermanent dwellings. The former include the Blackfoot, Arapaho, Assiniboine, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Gros [Page 997]Ventre, Kiowa, Lakota, Lipan, Plains Apache (or Kiowa Apache), Plains Cree, Plains Ojibwe, Sarsi, Nakoda (Stoney), and Tonkawa. The latter include the Arikara, Hidatsa, Iowa, Kaw (or Kansa), Kitsai, Mandan, Missouria, Omaha, Osage, Otoe, Pawnee, Ponca, Quapaw, Santee, Wichita, and Yankton Dakota. Both groups possessed religious systems based upon complex ceremonial cycles that were often connected to the natural world.

Like most Native American nations living in the United States today, Plains Indians (which include more than 28 culturally distinct groups living on countless reservations and off-reservation land trusts) continue to fight legal battles involving tribal sovereignty and treaty rights, strive to improve living conditions through economic developments, and work to maintain traditional cultural knowledge through art, education, and religion. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, there are approximately 495,032 individuals who culturally identified themselves with one of the federally recognized tribal nations comprising what is referred to here, in this overarching category, as Great Plains Indian.