In Wisconsin Chippewa tribe children learn the language of their ancestors with the help of computers. Today, Native Americans are citizens of the United States. Approximately half of American Indians live in big cities and rural areas across the country. Others live in federal reservations (about three hundred parcels of land, designed specifically for the Indians). The area of all reservations combined is 52.4 million acres (21 million hectares), or about 2.5 percent of all U.S. land. Most of the reserves are situated to the west of the Mississippi River (Brookeman, 2005). From 1970 to 1980, the number of Native Americans in the United States increased by 72 percent. At the moment, there are 1.4 million Native Americans (they account for 0.6 percent of the total population); it is assumed that it is much more than in the time when the European settlers first arrived. In those days, about a million of Native Americans lived in North America (Brookeman, 2005). As European civilization spread across the Americas, native population decreased. By 1920, Native American population was reduced to 350,000 people (Brookeman, 2005). .
In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain in search of a sea route to Asia. Eighteen months after the departure, his sailors saw land. Believing that he had landed in the Indies, a group of islands located to the east of the Asiatic coast, he called the people whom he saw first in the new land, the Indians. However, Columbus came to the New World (the Americas). American Indians, or Native Americans first came to North America during the last ice age. Over time, the number of these people increased; they adapted to different environments, and spread from the far northern coasts of Alaska and Canada to the very edge of South America. Some groups, such as the peaceful Pueblo tribes in the south-west of America, lived in busiest cities. They lived in high-rise buildings constructed of adobe bricks (clay and straw).