The Eastern Woodlands is a cultural region of the Indigenous people of North America. The Eastern Woodlands extended roughly from the

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's five borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions, with an area of about . It covers approximately 17% of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface and about 24% of its water surface area. During the ...

to the eastern

Great Plains The Great Plains is a broad expanse of plain, flatland in North America. The region stretches east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. They are the western part of the Interior Plains, which include th ...

, and from the

Great Lakes region The Great Lakes region of Northern America is a binational Canadian– American region centered on the Great Lakes that includes the U.S. states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and the Ca ...

to the

Gulf of Mexico The Gulf of Mexico () is an oceanic basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, mostly surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States; on the southw ...

, which is now part of the

Eastern United States The Eastern United States, often abbreviated as simply the East, is a macroregion of the United States located to the east of the Mississippi River. It includes 17–26 states and Washington, D.C., the national capital. As of 2011, the Eastern ...

and

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

. The

Plains Indians Plains Indians or Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies are the Native American tribes and First Nations peoples who have historically lived on the Interior Plains (the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies) of North ...

culture area is to the west; the

Subarctic The subarctic zone is a region in the Northern Hemisphere immediately south of the true Arctic, north of hemiboreal regions and covering much of Alaska, Canada, Iceland, the north of Fennoscandia, Northwestern Russia, Siberia, and the Cair ...

area to the north. The Indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands spoke languages belonging to several language groups, including Algonquian,

Iroquoian The Iroquoian languages () are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking. As of 2020, almost all surviving I ...

Muskogean Muskogean ( ; also Muskhogean) is a language family spoken in the Southeastern United States. Members of the family are Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Typologically, Muskogean languages are highly synthetic and agglutinative. One docume ...

, and Siouan, as well as apparently isolated languages such as Calusa, Chitimacha, Natchez,

Timucua The Timucua were a Native American people who lived in Northeast and North Central Florida and southeast Georgia. They were the largest indigenous group in that area and consisted of about 35 chiefdoms, many leading thousands of people. The va ...

, Tunica and

Yuchi The Yuchi people are a Native American tribe based in Oklahoma, though their original homeland was in the southeastern United States. In the 16th century, the Yuchi lived in the eastern Tennessee River valley. By the late 17th century, they had ...

. Many of these languages are still spoken today.

Background

The earliest known inhabitants of the Eastern Woodlands were peoples of the Adena and Hopewell cultures, the term for a variety of peoples, speaking different languages, who inhabited the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys between 800 BC and 800 AD, and were connected by trading and communication routes. The cultures had a tradition of building earthwork mounds and, in some cases, large shaped constructions known as effigy mounds. They had a variety of purposes, some apparently related to astronomical calculations and ritual observances. These peoples were generally hunters and gatherers, while also relying on some farming to produce food on the fertile land in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. For example, research from the Late Archaic period suggests that they ate grains such as sunflower, sumpweed, chenopod, knotweed, maygrass, and barley, and consumed several types of nuts such as hickory nuts, pecans, walnuts, acorns, and chestnuts that are spread across a large portion of the region. They most likely also consumed several types of fleshy fruits like cabbage palm,

persimmon The persimmon () is the edible fruit of a number of species of trees in the genus '' Diospyros''. The most widely cultivated of these is the Chinese and Japanese kaki persimmon, ''Diospyros kaki''. In 2022, China produced 77% of the world's p ...

, saw palmetto, or hawthorn that could be found in forest clearings and used as a supplemental source of vitamins and antioxidants. Tribes in the north may have also seen cultivation of tuber plants such as wild potato, garlic, and chufa that could grow in cold, frozen soil. Because of this reliance on farming, these tribes did not migrate like the more northern Eastern Woodlands tribes and instead stayed in one place, which resulted in them developing new social and political structures. The Eastern Woodlands tribes located further north (Algonquian-speaking people) relied heavily on hunting to acquire food. These tribes did not plant many crops, however, some tribes, such as the historic

Ojibwe The Ojibwe (; Ojibwe writing systems#Ojibwe syllabics, syll.: ᐅᒋᐺ; plural: ''Ojibweg'' ᐅᒋᐺᒃ) are an Anishinaabe people whose homeland (''Ojibwewaki'' ᐅᒋᐺᐘᑭ) covers much of the Great Lakes region and the Great Plains, n ...

, grew wild rice and relied on it as one of their major food sources. The type of animals these tribes hunted depended on the geographic location of the tribe. For example, the tribes located close to the coast hunted seals, porpoises, and whales, while the more inland tribes hunted deer, moose, and caribou. The meat was either cooked to be eaten immediately or was smoke-dried, to preserve it for later consumption. The largest political unit among the Eastern Woodland tribes were village bands, which were led by one chief. In the Eastern Woodlands Algonquian-speaking societies, patrilineal

clans A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship and descent. Even if lineage details are unknown, a clan may claim descent from a founding member or apical ancestor who serves as a symbol of the clan's unity. Many societie ...

had names associated with animal totems; these clans comprised the village bands. The Eastern Woodlands Iroquoian-speaking societies had a

matrilineal Matrilineality, at times called matriliny, is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which people identify with their matriline, their mother's lineage, and which can involve the inheritan ...

kinship system, with inheritance and property passed through the mother's line. The Iroquoian village-bands were also composed of numerous clans. Individuals would marry outside their clan to form exogamous clans. They considered themselves to be sibling with the other individuals within the exogamous clan.

References

{{Authority control Eastern First Nations in Canada Native American tribes Eastern United States

Background

See also

References