Native Canadian Tribes

What is a tribe?

A Native American tribe, Indian tribe, tribal nation or nation is any extant or historical tribe, band, nation, or other group or community of Indigenous peoples in the United States. Modern forms of these entities are often associated with land or territory of a reservation.

The tribes of Ontario, and Eastern Canada 

Algonquin

• The Algonquins are original natives of southern Quebec and eastern Ontario, in Canada. Today they live in nine communities in Quebec and one in Ontario. 

The Cree

• The Cree tribe is one of the largest American Indian groups in North America. There are 200,000 Cree people today living in communities throughout Canada and in parts of the northern United States

The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tribes

• here were five tribes in the original Iroquois Confederacy: the Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga Later a sixth nation, the Tuscarora tribe, joined the confederation.

• Many other tribes, such as the Huron and the Cherokee, are sometimes called "Iroquoian" tribes. They are called that because they are distant relatives of the Iroquois Confederacy tribes and speak related languages. However, they were never part of the Iroquois Confederacy. In fact, they were sometimes at war with them.

The Ojibwe

• The Ojibwe and Ottawa Indians are members of a longstanding alliance also including the Potawatomi tribe. Called the Council of Three Fires, this alliance was a powerful one which clashed with the mighty Iroquois Confederacy and the Sioux, eventually getting the better of both. The Ojibwe people were less devastated by European epidemics than their densely-populated Algonquian cousins to the east, and they resisted manhandling by the whites much better. 

Micmac

• The Mi'kmaq Nation was a member of the Wabanaki Confederacy that controlled northern New England and the Canadian Maritimes. The Micmacs are original natives of the Nova Scotia/New Brunswick region. They also settled in locations in Quebec, Newfoundland, and Maine.

Mohawk

• the Mohawk Indian tribe was one of the original members of the Iroquois Confederation, or Kanonsionni in their own language ("people of the longhouse.") The other member nations were the the Seneca, the Oneida, the Cayuga, and the Onondaga. Later a sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, joined the confederacy. Today these long-term allies refer to themselves as the Haudenosaunee or Six Nations.

Excellent resources such as native-languages.org exist for learning about the Native American Tribes, languages, and teachings.