What do native people do

Practice: Native American societies before contact. Practice: Native American societies before European contact. Pre-colonization European society.

African societies and the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. Practice: European and African societies before contact. Next lesson. Native American peoples throughout the Western region determined their unique lifestyle by their proximity and abundance of natural resources.

Many lived in permanent settlements, known as pueblos, built of stone and adobe. These pueblos featured great multistory dwellings that resembled apartment houses.

At their centers, many of these villages also had large ceremonial pit houses, or kivas. Other Southwestern peoples, such as the Navajo and the Apache, were more nomadic.

They survived by hunting, gathering and raiding their more established neighbors for their crops. Because these groups were always on the move, their homes were much less permanent than the pueblos. For instance, the Navajo fashioned their iconic eastward-facing round houses, known as hogans, out of materials like mud and bark. Spanish colonists and missionaries had enslaved many of the Pueblo Indians, for example, working them to death on vast Spanish ranches known as encomiendas.

The Great Basin culture area, an expansive bowl formed by the Rocky Mountains to the east, the Sierra Nevadas to the west, the Columbia Plateau to the north, and the Colorado Plateau to the south, was a barren wasteland of deserts, salt flats and brackish lakes. Its people, most of whom spoke Shoshonean or Uto-Aztecan dialects the Bannock, Paiute and Ute, for example , foraged for roots, seeds and nuts and hunted snakes, lizards and small mammals.

Because they were always on the move, they lived in compact, easy-to-build wikiups made of willow poles or saplings, leaves and brush. Their settlements and social groups were impermanent, and communal leadership what little there was was informal. After European contact, some Great Basin groups got horses and formed equestrian hunting and raiding bands that were similar to the ones we associate with the Great Plains natives.

Before European contact, the temperate California area had more people than any other North American landscape at the time, approximately , people in the midth century.

It's estimated that different tribes and groups spoke more than dialects. Despite this great diversity, many native Californians lived very similar lives. They did not practice much agriculture. Instead, they organized themselves into small, family-based bands of hunter-gatherers known as tribelets. Inter-tribelet relationships, based on well-established systems of trade and common rights, were generally peaceful.

Spanish explorers infiltrated the California region in the middle of the 16th century. The Northwest Coast culture area, along the Pacific coast from British Columbia to the top of Northern California, has a mild climate and an abundance of natural resources.

As a result, unlike many other hunter-gatherers who struggled to eke out a living and were forced to follow animal herds from place to place, the Indians of the Pacific Northwest were secure enough to build permanent villages that housed hundreds of people apiece.

Those villages operated according to a rigidly stratified social structure, more sophisticated than any outside of Mexico and Central America. Goods like these played an important role in the potlatch, an elaborate gift-giving ceremony designed to affirm these class divisions. Most of its people lived in small, peaceful villages along stream and riverbanks and survived by fishing for salmon and trout, hunting and gathering wild berries, roots and nuts.

In the 18th century, other native groups brought horses to the Plateau. In , the explorers Lewis and Clark passed through the area, followed by increasing numbers of white settlers. By the end of the 19th century, most of the remaining members of Plateau tribes had been cleared from their lands and resettled in government reservations.

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Long before Christopher Columbus stepped foot on what would come to be known as the Americas, the expansive territory was inhabited by Native Americans. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, as more explorers sought to colonize their land, Native Americans responded in various List Name Delete from selected List. Save to. Save to:. Save Create a List. Create a list. Save Back. Native American Contributions. Grades 3—5 , 6—8 , 9— Foods Edible plants domesticated by Native Americans have become major staples in the diets of peoples all around the world.

Animals Native Americans were the first to raise turkeys, llamas, guinea pigs, and honeybees for food. Non-edible plants Other plants of great importance developed by Native Americans include cotton, rubber, and tobacco. Medicines The Quechua peoples of Peru discovered the medicinal use for quinine.