Topic 1 · The First Americans

Lesson 1: Introducing the First Americans

Study guide notes, academic vocabulary, and review questions with answers. Textbook pages 2–6.

The lesson video is posted in Google Classroom. This page is the written material that goes with it, in the same order as your workbook: notes first, then vocabulary, then the review questions. Answers are hidden until you click Show answer. Try each one in your workbook before you click.

The Lesson, in Two Parts

Study Guide Notes

• Environment & Surroundings

  Early Native Americans developed extremely close connections with the physical environments and natural resources surrounding them. This led to diverse ways of life rather than a single, shared culture.

• The Southwest Region

  Ancestral Puebloans lived in dry desert environments and adapted by building multistory homes out of sun-dried clay.

• The Southeast Region

  Plentiful forests allowed tribes to build dwellings from wood and bark, often surrounded by defensive barriers.

• The Far North Region

  Extremely cold, snowy Arctic climates with frozen soil forced people to adapt to water and marine life.

Three regions, three different houses, and the reason is the same every time: people built with whatever the land around them gave them. Clay in the desert. Bark in the forest. In the Far North, where the ground stays frozen, the sea.

Academic Vocabulary

Environment

The physical surroundings of a region, including climate, landforms, soil, water, and vegetation.

Resource

Materials found in nature that people can use to survive, build, trade, or craft tools (for example, wood, clay, water, marine life).

Adaptation

The process by which communities change their behaviors, technology, housing, and lifestyles to successfully survive in their specific environment.

Cultural Region

A geographic area where different groups of people share similar environmental conditions and adapt by developing similar ways of life, housing, and resource use.

Culture

A shared system of beliefs, traditions, behaviors, and knowledge belonging to a specific group of people.

Adobe

A plaster made of sun-dried clay and straw used by Southwest peoples to construct multistory insulated homes.

Palisade

A tall defensive wall made of sharpened tree trunks built to protect Southeast forest villages.

Permafrost

Ground that is frozen solid year-round, preventing farming in the Arctic / Far North region.

Watch these two: a cultural region is a place. A culture is what a group of people share. They sound alike and they are not the same.

Review Questions

1. Identifying: Which peoples lived on the Great Plains?

   Map question · cultural regions map, printed page 5

   Show answer

   Any of the peoples labeled inside the Great Plains band on the map: Apache, Cheyenne, Dakota, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, Omaha, Osage, and Blackfoot.

   Your workbook asks for at least two. Write three to be safe.

2. Places and Regions: What physical feature divides the Great Plains from the Eastern and Southeastern regions?

   Map question · cultural regions map, printed page 5

   Show answer

   The Mississippi River.

   Trace the eastern edge of the Plains band on the map and the river is labeled right along it. The reading backs it up: the Great Plains slope down from the base of the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River.

3. Question 8: How did the native peoples of the Far North make use of large sea mammals?

   Checking for Understanding

   Show answer

   Since permafrost made farming impossible, Arctic peoples hunted large marine mammals — whales, seals, and walruses — and used the whole animal:

   • Food — the meat was a vital food source.
   • Tools — bones were carved into tools.
   • Clothing — hides were made into warm clothing.
   • Shelter — skins were stretched over frames.

   Start your answer with permafrost. That one fact is why they turned to the sea.

4. Question 7: What advantages did cliff dwellings offer to the Ancestral Puebloans who built them?

   Checking for Understanding

   Show answer

   Two advantages, and full credit needs both:

   • Shelter and insulation from extreme temperatures — useful in a desert that swings from a hot day to a cold night.
   • Natural structural defense against enemy attacks, since a home partway up a rock face is hard to reach.

   Spelling note: the textbook map labels this group Ancient Puebloans. The reading calls them Ancestral Puebloans. Same people.

5. Regional Groups: Name the five main Native American cultural regions within North America and list three Native American groups who lived in each before 1492.

   Checking for Understanding · five rows in your workbook table

   Show answer

   The reading section Understanding the Time and Place uses five region headings. Groups below are examples — other groups named on the map for the same region also count.

   Region	Three groups
   The North	Inuit, Inupiak, Yupik
   The West	Nez Perce, Chinook, Tlingit
   The Southwest	Hopi, Navajo, Zuni
   The Great Plains	Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow
   The East	Southeast part: Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw · Northeast part: Iroquois, Algonquian, Susquehanna

   Why the numbers look different on the page. The reading names five regions, and it splits the last one, The East, into a Southeast part and a Northeast part. The map beside it shades ten finer regions: Arctic, California, Great Basin, Great Plains, Northeast Woodlands, Northwest Coast, Plateau, Southeast, Southwest, and Subarctic. Neither is wrong. The five are the big reading regions; the ten are the finer detail a map can show. Your table has five rows, so use the five.

   Name spellings vary too. The map and the reading do not always match — Blackfoot and Blackfeet are the same people, and so are Dakota and Sioux. Use whichever spelling your page shows.

Before You Close This

If someone asked you right now how Native American ways of life differed based on their surroundings, you should be able to answer in one sentence: people built their lives out of what was around them. If you can name the material each region built with and say why, you have Lesson 1.

Image credits

Every photograph in this video is public domain or CC0. Credit is given as a courtesy.

• Sea ice, Chukchi Sea — USFWS Alaska, public domain
• Pacific walrus — Joel Garlich-Miller, USFWS, public domain
• Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park — NPS (Fagerlund), public domain
• Saguaro, Sonoran Desert, Arizona — Angwinar, CC0
• Bison herd — USFWS, public domain
• Blue Ridge Mountains, Deep Gap — Ken Thomas, public domain
• Cliff dwelling, Mesa Verde — w_lemay, CC0
• Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán — Gary Lee Todd, CC0

Textbook page images are reproduced for classroom use only.