I love /r/MapPorn. It's almost as good a source as /r/TodayILearned for bad history. Like this map, which was posted in this thread this morning. While I suppose it's technically bad alternate history, it's still bad history for its misunderstanding of where Native American groups lived, when Native American groups lived, and - most importantly for purposes of this post - how stagnant nation states and Native Americans are.

As far as the bad history in the map itself, /u/CognitioCupitor offers a great comment listing the many different ways in which the map is wrong here. To steal quote liberally from it, its problems include:

• The Olmecs having disappeared around 400 BCE, raising the interesting question of what they're doing in Mexico in 2015.

• The Anasazi also having disappeared long before 1492, once again raising the question of how they made such a remarkable come-back.

• The Cheyenne, Chickasaw, and Crow only being in the west because of expansion by settlers and displacement

• A host of location problems for most of the groups, as well as a misunderstanding of the factors that allowed them to rise to power in the first place (i.e. Comanche needing horses, which only happened because of the arrival of Europeans)

Essentially, there's a lot wrong with the map. What I think must absolutely be kept in mind, though, is how Native American history was never a static thing. Much like how this map of Europe in 1500 can't really be used to determine what modern Europe would look like because of the shifting political landscape of the continent, we can't look what existed in 1492 (...or nearly a millennium before that, if you want to be weird about it) as a gauge of what could have existed in 2015.

Just as an example of this, let's take the history of the Iroquois League prior to European contact, how it developed, and how that shows how Native American political history was hardly this stagnant, permanent entity. Based on oral tradition, the Iroquois League was most likely founded in 1451 (though there is debate about this date, with most scholars agreeing that it was probably somewhere between 1450 and 1600) through the political machinations and religious message of Great Peacemaker and Hiawatha, both of whom sought to unite the various warring groups in the area around the southern Great Lakes into a united confederacy for greater protection and economic prosperity. Each of the five groups - the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca - joined as pressure from the others mounted, with the Seneca being the last to join. With the League's united power, they were able to expand into larger and larger territories, displacing or subjugating smaller groups, like the Akansea and Mosopelea. They became the dominant force in the area, and an empire in pretty much every sense of the word. Their political power had a huge impact in shaping northeastern North America, and sent ripple effects throughout the Mississippi River delta as groups migrated away from the Iroquois.

These sort of events happened time and time again through the history of pre-Columbian America. Empires rose and fell, groups moved and vanished, and political entities shifted and altered. North and South America were as much political entities as anything in Europe, unlike what this map suggests. Really, this map seems to exist in that greater trend of assuming that anything outside Eurasia is history-less, or history that doesn't matter anyway. In truth, there's as much to know as with any other group of people, and it's just as interesting.