ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concept of American Indian lands as exclusively claimed and defended territories with historical data on the actual geographic distributions of various Indian populations. American Indian territorial systems and use of territory in historic times have been studied from two separate but related perspectives. The expression "tribe" has appeared widely in journalistic and scholarly writings on the American Indian. From initial European contact through the nineteenth century, the word tribe in primary sources was often used synonymously with "nation." The kinds of territorial sharing and intertribal relations described for the western Great Lakes were also reported in the northern Plains from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. The northern Plains tribes who formed strong sociopolitical alliances exhibited little sense of territorial exclusiveness. A historical examination of American Indian social organization and territoriality has important practical applications. A regional perspective which considers kinship relations opens up new possibilities for ethnohistory.
