Little known facts about Native Americans


In honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, did you know…

The tribes of Foxes, Saux, and Assiniboine played a game called shinny, which is where the modern sport of hockey originatedThe sequoia tree is named after the Cherokee leader Sequoyah, who among other things created a  syllabary in 1821, making reading and writing within the Cherokee Nation possible.

  • It is estimated that as much as 60 percent of the global food supply is based on crops that originated in North America.
  • Ancient Indigenous people were the first to domesticate the strains of maize that produced popcorn thousands of years ago.
  • Historians believe corn itself was created by Indigenous farmers in southern Mexico and Guatemala 10,000 years ago.
  • The Navajo Nation is the largest Indian reservation in the United States, comprising about 16 million acres, or about 27,000 square miles.
  • As many as 500 different spoken languages were recognized by Indigenous peoples across the American continent prior to European colonization.
  • Native Americans were one of the main architects of Democracy. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy (also widely known as the Iroquois Confederacy), was formed by five tribal nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca nearly 900 years ago. It is considered one of the oldest Democracies known to historians.
  • The Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy – known as The Great Law of Peace – served as a model used to draft the Constitution of the United States.
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