Pre-Columbian maps

[kayshapero]

The Map Of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before
by Hansi Lo Wang
NPR June 24, 2014 -4:03 PM ET

Finding an address on a map can be taken for granted in the age of GPS and smartphones. But centuries of forced relocation, disease and genocide have made it difficult to find where many Native American tribes once lived.

Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., has pinpointed the locations and original names of hundreds of American Indian nations before their first contact with Europeans.

As a teenager, Carapella says he could never get his hands on a continental US map depicting more than 600 tribes — many now forgotten and lost to history. Now, the 34-year-old designs and sells maps as large as 3 by 4 feet with the names of tribes hovering over land they once occupied.
(more)

Copies of the maps (one for Canada and the US, another for Mexico) in pdf form are linked to from the article, for easy downloading.  I've got them and have been having fun looking around.

Comments

[asg-qa-s7.livejournal.com]

This will be a good resource for the Professora's multicultural lit classes. She covers Sherman Alexi (Smoke Signals), among other native writers.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

I was just talking with someone about which tribes lived in or migrated through Colorado. Now I can get more info. More info = good.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

The PDFs are blurry and hard to read - apparently so he can sell the printed versions. Drat.

[kayshapero]

The images take awhile to download properly, after which the blur goes away, so you just have to wait for awhile.

[sue-bursztynski.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I've bookmarked this, it would be good research material . Pity about the blur, but I guess you can understand why someone who's put a lot of work into something wants to sell it.