Did you ever wonder how many American Indian Tribes exist today?

 

By David McClelland

 

I read John Grisham's book of short stories, Ford County, written in 2009. I really enjoyed all of the stories and one story, Casino, involves the creation of an Indian casino in a small town in Mississippi by a man who claimed to be part American Indian; i.e., Yazoo. That caused me to wonder about our U.S. Indian tribes and I did the research.

 

I was astounded to learn that there are more than 550 recognized Indian tribes and 310 Indian reservations in the United States. There are too many tribes to include here, but I will list the ones that I recognized, probably from my early years of watching western movies. They are: Apache, Arapaho, Aztec, Blackfoot, Cherokee, Chippewa, Choctaw, Comanche, Crow, Dakota, Hopi, Mohawk, Osage, Pawnee, Seminole, Shawnee, Sioux, Ute, Wyandotte, Yuma and Zuni. Sound familiar?

 

Next are examples of tribes with which I was unfamiliar are: Abanki, Bella, Coola, Caddo, Dene, Eyak, Fox, Gae, Hare, Ihak, Jemez, Kato, Lnuk, Mahican, Nde, Opata, Pipil, Qiripi, Red, Saponi, Tewa, Uchi, Ventureno, Walla Walla, Yaqui and Zapotec. Their PR firms must really be failures.

 

And where do they all live? An Indian reservation is an area of land managed by a Native American tribe under the United States Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs. All Indian reservations combined cover 55.7 million acres or 2.3% of the United States. 12 reservations are larger than the state of Rhode Island. The territory of the Navajo Nation compares in size with the State of West Virginia. The name "reservation" comes from the conception of the Indian tribes as independent sovereigns at the time the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Today, a little more than half of all Indians live off of the reservations, often in large western cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles.

 

Gaming – In1979, the Seminole tribe in Florida opened a high-stakes bingo operation on its reservation in Florida. The state attempted to close the operation, but was prevented from doing so by the courts. In the 1980's, the case of California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians established the right of reservations to operate other forms of gambling. In 1998, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which recognized the right of Native American Indians to establish gaming and gaming facilities on their reservations as long as the states in which they are located have some form of legalized gambling. Successful gaming operations on some reservations have greatly increased the economic wealth of the tribes, enabling their investment to improve infrastructure, education and the health of their people.

 

If you would like to learn more about Indian reservations, one of many sources is:

www.cr.nps.gov/nagpra/DOCUMENTS/RESERV.PDF