ABSTRACT
The history of American immigration begins with Indians, because what is now the United States was not empty before Europeans came. The first concept to grasp is diversity. North America was not a unitary place, and it was not inhabited by only one sort of people prior to the European invasion. Take language. More different languages were spoken in what is now California alone than in all of Europe in 1500. Perhaps as many as 143 language families-as different from each other as the SinoTibetan language family is from the Indo-European-coexisted in America north of Mexico. Some families of related languages like the Algonquian family (including languages spoken by the Pequot, Abnaki, Menominee, Chippewa, and many more Native groups) were spoken over wide territories by relatively large numbers of people. Others like the languages in the Ritwan family were employed in only very limited locales by small numbers of closely related peoples. Scholars figure there were about 1000 different Native American languages in all (Figure 2.1).2
