Image credit: Native Land

Ask any person to name a Native American tribe and you’ll probably come up with the same handful of names (or a blank stare). But visualization tool Native Land can help you identify hundreds of tribes, even ones in your current town. It’s a colorful and informative visualization and gateway to a history of which you were probably unaware.


Native Lands is a web app that, after entering your location and selecting the information you’re interested in (choices include territories, languages, and treaties), presents you with color-coded regions.


Hover over whatever region you’d like to see links to external sites providing even more information. The links included are neat, as they usually lead to either government-hosted sites explaining the history of a tribe or a site hosted by the tribe itself rather than a Wikipedia page.

My own knowledge of Native American history is pretty sketchy—the only thing I remember from school is the “Six Nations” nickname ascribed to the Iroquois Confederacy. But Native Land showed me dozens of other tribes in the Northeast region of America, including smaller tribes conquered by the Iroquois.