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Among the least nomadic tribes were the Mandan, who moved to what is now North Dakota from the Ohio Valley in the 14th century. They were very much a settled in agricultural civilization by the time Lewis and Clark rediscovered them in 1804. The French explorer LaVerandre had wintered with them nearly a century earlier.

Then, of course, there were the Pueblo, whose villages had lasted centuries before the nomadic Apache and Navajo begin to raid them.

We have a Navajo friend who tells us the division of the Navajo and Apache are basically a white man's invention. The only real difference is that the Navajo accepted white man's invitation to settle down and go into sheep ranching a half century or so before their Apache cousins accepted a comparable offer.

The plot gets even thicker than that. According to the legend of the Navajo and Apache, their ancestors were forced into the nomadic lifestyle by a cruel and barbarous civilization from the south which enslaved them and used them in human sacrifice. Thus, they escaped across the great desert and moved north.

Accordingly, many of them do not look kindly on the Mexican invasion of our southwest. They see it as a centuries old conflict of a centuries old conflict of the Aztec oppressors who ruined their own homeland now invading the land which they helped tame.

The Chippewa’s, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi’s were nomadic in the sense that their communities were built in temporary structures and not fixed in one place during a year or short period of years. This was a necessary and nomadic cultural practice required by their sedentary form of hunting, gathering, and gardening culture and economy. The community had to be moved seasonally or periodically when the game for hunting became scarce, the soils lost fertility for gsthering and gardening, and disease became problematic due to the accumulation of pests and sanitary degradation. As in many nomadic cultures, the communities rotated the campsites for their communities and lodges within a geographic region that shifted along with the changes in territorial dominance among the bands, clans, tribes, and confederations.

The Pre-Columbian and early colonial contacts with Europeans resulted in these people migrating away from their territories along the shores of Eastern North America to and around the Great Lakes region. This mass migration of the culture seems to coincide with one or more pandemics resulting from contact with Old World diseases and possible indications of a Pre-Columbian New World diseases such as forms of hemorhagic fevers found in such places as present day Mexico City and its valley.

These mass migrations were negotiated with their brother Mi’kmaq and father Abnaki peoples, and were made at the expense and conquest of the Iriquois, Sioux, and Fox among others. So, they were in fact a nomadic and migratory Neolithic culture.