Which Native American tribes inhabited Colorado?
DENVER (KDVR) — Native American tribes have lived in Colorado for thousands of years and throughout several generations.
According to History Colorado and the Colorado Department of Education, tribes who have lived in what is now Colorado include but are not limited to descendants from the Ancestral Puebloan People, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, the Shoshone, the Apache nation and the longest-continuous residents of Colorado, the Nuuciu, which are now known as the Ute.
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Other tribes whose territory extended into Colorado include the Comanche, the Kiowa and the Navajo tribe.
Where did these tribes live?
Ancestral Puebloan People lived in the southwest parts of Colorado for thousands of years, living in homes, villages and cliff dwellings they built.
The Nuuciu moved around with the seasons and lived for generations in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, along with a few other states. The tribe hunted and gathered everything they needed and traded for horses, according to History Colorado.
Many different tribes lived and moved through the Great Plains of eastern Colorado, like the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. They hunted bison and traded for horses and other goods.
Other tribes have ancestral lands all across Colorado, including Tribes of the Great Basin in western Colorado. Some tribes have connections to the southeastern and northeastern plains of Colorado.
According to tribal histories shared by History Colorado, at least 48 modern American Indian tribes have lived, at times, throughout the area of Colorado. Today, many modern descendants can be traced back to these original tribes.
Thousands of individual descendants still live across the state and country.
According to the 2020 data from the United States Census Bureau, Colorado is home to 74,129 American Indian and Alaska Natives. This is out of the 3,727,135 in the U.S.
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