Describe North America before European contact as home to hundreds of distinct Native nations, each with its own government, language, and way of life, organized into culture regions.
Long before 1492, North America was home to millions of people, organized into hundreds of distinct nations, each with its own government, language, and traditions. Historians and geographers group these nations into culture areas -- regions where nations shared similar ways of getting food, building homes, and organizing society, shaped by the land, climate, and resources around them. From the icy Arctic to the desert Southwest, from the woodlands of the East to the rain-soaked Pacific Coast, every region held nations who had lived there, and adapted to it, for thousands of years before any European ship reached these shores.
There was no single "Native American culture," any more than there was a single "European culture." Nations traded, allied, and sometimes fought with each other across huge distances, much like countries do today. Some nations, like the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Northeast, built powerful confederacies joining several nations under one set of shared laws. Others lived in smaller, independent villages. This year you will meet nations from several of these regions and see, again and again, how geography shaped the choices people made about how to live.
Mastery looks like: They can name at least three North American culture areas and explain that geography shaped each region's way of life.
Common stumbles: Treating all Native nations as one single culture instead of hundreds of distinct nations; assuming culture areas mean identical lifeways within them.