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 originated.



• The 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.