The Sioux,Cheyenne, Blackfoot etc etc.
Did these guys have their own territory or was it a case of “Hey guys I’m sick of this place, lets move over them thar hills”.
I’m asking 'cos in a lot of films they seem to uproot for winter/summer and move elsewhere.
Also, if they were territorial wouldn’t there be some inter-tribal warfare if they moved onto another hunting ground
There was quite a bit of intertribal warfare. Some tribes tortured captives, and several took slaves. The Kwakiutl of British Columbia were said to have taken heads a couple/few hundred years ago. (Although from what I’ve heard they were generally a fairly peaceful tribe.) I’m certainly no expert, but the impression I have is that they had their territories, and conflicts would happen when they neared another tribe’s territory.
What I’d like to know is what they call themselves. I was listening to NPR last week and they had an author who kept saying ‘Indian’. When the interviewer asked him about that (she said ‘Native American’) the author, who grew up on a reservation, said ‘That’s what we call ourselves.’ (FWIW, the politically correct term in Canada seems to be ‘First Nation’.)
Well, many (not all) of the Plains Indians had nomadic cultures. (Which of course did not mean they were constantly on the move – just recurrently.) But in general nearly every cultural lifestyle represented in the Old World was also found in the New. As for the specific example you give (move elsewhere for the summer/winter) the technical term for this is transhumance, and it’s generally associated with upland areas (e.g., Switzerland, the Carpathians) where herds are pastured and/or crops grown on alps (mountain meadows, not the mountain range of that name) but they retreat into the valley for the winter. I don’t know of specific examples of transhumance civilizations in pre-Columbian America offhand, but would be very surprised if there were none.
As for terminology, and the accuracy of it, “Native American” at least betokens an intent to be courteous and “Indian” is accepted by many with ironic good grace. “Amerind” is dorky – a portmanteauing of ‘American Indian’ to create an anthropological term. IMO, it’s more courteous to find out what nation the particular Indian in question belongs to, and if you need to use a culture epithet, use the proper name for his nation. Don’t you think so, white man? 
“First Nations,” in addition to being accurate AFAWK, and carrying no negatives, also has a slightly different meaning than the common U.S. terms: it includes both “Indians” and “Eskimos” (“Inuit” is vastly preferred in the NWT, Yukon, and Nunavut). Look at an ethnic map of Canada and you will see why this is important.
In the case of the tribes you mentioned (and the Blackfeet are a Sioux tribe), both the Sioux and the Cheyenne were originally farmers living in villages. But after the Europeans came to North America, it caused a bunch of population migrations that led to them being forced onto the Great Plains, where they became nomadic hunters.
But even on the Great Plains, living as nomads, they had territory. They just moved over the territory.
They called themselves whatever they were. Their word equivalents of Nakota - “Ihanktowan-Ihanktowana” and Lakota - “Teton” and Dakota - “Isanti” (all allies, but independent nations; we now call them all “Sioux”) and Cherokee and so forth. There was no blanket term to refer to the large and unrelated group of people that we know consider “Indians”, or “Native Americans”. A Lakota and a Cherokee would not consider themselves to be the same any more than a Norseman is like a Greek.
Most people I’ve met on reservations or active in the pursuit of the traditional lifestyle (as much as it can be, of course) use Indian. There’s definitely a backlash against “Native American”, as it’s just another example of White people telling them who they are now and that their previous self-identity (“Indian”) is wrong and bad. When talking amongst themselves, they’ll often use “The People” or “Our People”, though.
Note that most of my personal experience is with Lakota and Cherokee folks, this may be totally different elsewhere.
I don’t remember what tribe the interviewee was from.
On Michael Palins “Pole to Pole” he interviews an Inuit in Antartica who says that he is the only QUOTE Eskimo UNQUOTE on this continent.
This was dealt with at some length in another thread a week or so back. The peoples referred to as “Eskimo” are divided into two main groups, with a much smaller third group, plus the allied Aleuts, who are not ordinarily included among the Eskimos. The larger of the two groups are the Inuit, and all Greenlandic and Canadian Eskimos are Inuit, along with those of the northern part of Alaska.
Because the term “Eskimo” originated in a highly negative epithet from neighboring peoples (the Athabascans? IDRC), the Canadian Inuit regard “Eskimo” as insulting and prefer the use of “Inuit.” On the other hand, in Alaska where all three groups and the Aleuts occupy adjacent territories, “Eskimo” is preferred, by and large, to avoid calling a non-Inuit by that name. (But of course if you are speaking of the Inuit in the strict sense, excluding the other groups, that would of course be accurate.)
So essentially what is PC depends on political boundaries.
Moderator’s Note: I don’t really see a debate here.
Perhaps there are more buffalo over in General Questions.
For a remark appealing to that stereotype, someone ought to sioux! 
It does, however, remind me of a zoo expecting the birth of a baby buffalo in 1976, which they of course named Tenniel. 
Interesting – I was going to say that the word Teton (as in the Wyoming mountain, and its surrounding national park, both known as Grand Teton) came from a French slang term for “breast”. However, not only is that theory in dispute, but Teton appears to derive from Sioux words meaning “dwellers on the prairie”.
Polycarp: Are you speaking of the Esquimaux? 
Pretty good job, except that you don’t want to call anyone “Sioux” :smack: Why? Because that word means “enemy” in the language of one of their neighbors.
All of them I’ve known prefer Lakota, whether they’re Lakota, Nakota or Dakota. I’m Tsalagi (better known as Cherokee).
And as Polycarp said, just about every kind of culture found in the Old World could be found here (and then some; we also had some pure democracies, at that time known only in Iceland) … until after De Soto (a prime culprit) and others traipsed over our territory, spreading disease as they went. There was a culture in the Gulf States that resembled Pharaonic Egypt in many ways that was killed off by the diseases spread by De Soto, his troops and his pigs (yes, they trundled along a herd of swine with them, now known to be prime incubators for pandemics). :smack: :smack:
That’s comforting to know… The Grand Tetons, with their jags and crags and sharp edges, are about the least boobilicious mountains one will find anywhere. I had always assumed that the European explorers who named them had just been away from women for so long they’d forgotten what they looked like.
Yeah, but see the same source’s definition of Inuit. 
Thanks for the clarification. I meant to mention it, but I left it out somehow in the final edit. Hence the “scare quotes” around “Sioux” with no elaboration! :smack:
And thanks also for your people’s name for yourselves. I remembered that Cherokee wasn’t it, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
To my mind at least, being known as “enemy” has an element of coolness to it .
It raises images of fear and respect ,a "dont fuck with these people “sort of thing.Much better then people thinking of you as say the “beaker folk” or the"mound builders” for example.
Well as a Brit I didn’t know that the Blackfeet and Sioux are one and the same.
So there was tribal warfare, right.
Now then just supposing these different tribes had buried the hatchet (tomahawk) and got together, would it have been possible to drive whitey off and back into the sea.
I realise we had guns but even so there were a hell of a lot more injuns than Europeans
Appealing to stereotypes? “How?”
Generally, they call themselves Indians and Eskimos, the intelligentsia call them Native Americans, Inuit, etc. etc. and tell them thats what they should call themselves and they should feel insulted when someone refers to them in the former manner, more or less.
I’m not too well up on USA early history, but my understanding is that we gave guns and steel to one tribe and helped them slaughter their enemies.
Pretty rational behaviour for all involved.