Anthropology has always been susceptible to trends and fads. In the 1960�s women were struggling for equal rights and Sherry B. Ortner , a noted anthropologist, was not lost on the popularity of the subject. She erroneously stated, �The secondary status of women in society is one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact� (Ortner 1974: 402). Clearly Ortner was inculturated with traditional beliefs when she offered an application of universal explanations as to how and why women are viewed as an inferior gender. The footnotes by McGee and Warms that are attached to Ortner�s paper claim that this position has been abandoned by anthropologists and was a result of �politically charged� writing (McGee and Warms 1996: 402). However, in conducting a survey I have found this phenomena to still be with us. In fact, of 107 students surveyed, 102 believed that women in Amerindian societies held an inferior position.

A similar problem exists with names. There have been long discussions on what Amerindians should be called by committees, students in anthropology and various other factions. Ironically they seldom ask the Indian. I did. After I completed over 300 interviews I found that 93% of Amerindians prefer to be called by their nationality. Cherokees are just that, Cherokees. Sioux are Sioux and so on. Like Ortner, Western society has made the mistake of taking a pan cultural view and while 78% of the Amerindians I talked with did prefer American Indian over Native American, it was primarily for legal reasons. American Indian is how they are referred to in treaty with the United States government. Native American denotes any person born in the United States and was derived by Westerners concerned with what they called �being politically correct.� I chose a compromise by contracting American Indian into Amerindian in 1992. I did this solely to avoid the Native American vs. American Indian debate in my papers.

The point of this rather brutal introduction is to clearly drive home the fact that Amerindains are not a homogeneous group. Amerindians constitute a vast and diverse array of nations every bit as sovereign as any other in the world. The term tribe is normaly missused as it denotes an extended family group more so than a nation.

What follows is a catalog of the known nations. Most are historical, that is they were noted by Westerners from 1492 on. Some few are known only from oral traditions or archaeological evidence such as the Adena/Hopewell culture group.

Because we are dealing with so many diverse and unique peoples I have constructed the catalog both alphabetically and by state or region. I have relied heavily on John R. Swanton�s work published by the United States government under various reports published by the Bureau of American Ethnology and other primary sources including the likes of George Catlin and Hernado de Soto. The bibliography lists these sources and if a citation is missing or incorrect it is purely accidental.