Pre-Contact North American linguistic map

I've always been fascinated by this, but here's a collection of the various maps, with some commentary by me... just for fun. 

"Pre-contact" is of course somewhat arbitrary. Much of the territory covered here in the first group was actually Norse before it was any "native" language, but when the Little Ice Age started and the Norse colonies started to falter, the Eskimo seal-hunting way of life was more tenable than the Norse sheep grazing way of life.

Eskimo-Aleut family (Greenlandic in the east and Yupik in the far West are the two largest entities). This is obviously the latest arriving language family, and it's spread is pseudo-historical; they weren't in Greenland, at least, at the time of Viking settlement, although they were arriving as the Norse settlements were faltering due to the onset of the Little Ice Age.

Na-Dene is the next family, covering much of Alaska and western Canada, but languages most familiar to most Americans are Navajo and related Apache, which are geographically isolated from the rest of the family. This family has—intriguingly—been linked to the Yeniseian language family in central Siberia (which is now mostly extinct; just a handful of speakers of a handful of languages still remain.) That linkage is linguistically kind of controversial, but tentatively most people in the profession believe it likely. 

Algic Languages, which are mostly Algonquin, plus a few other smaller languages, are a large group mostly in southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States. As you can see, it spreads quite far to the west, however, and Blackfoot, Arapaho and Cheyenne belong too. There are some speculative claims that the urheimat may have been to the West, either west of the Great Lakes or even as far west as the Columbia Plateau in Washington State. It's also not clear that the majority of the Algonquin languages are actually a genetic rather than areal family.

The Iroquois languages are geographically more limited, but their impact on the early colonists was significant, and their nations were powerful and populous. Even today, these are some of the more famous Indian groups, like the Cherokee and the Mohawk.

Siouan languages are mostly Great Plains languages, although a few were located in the East in Virginia and North Carolina. My own new location, in fact, is smack dab in the Catawban range. Siouan, Caddoan and the Iroquian languages may have some primeval connection, either as distant relatives of each other, or as former neighbors who had features spread as part of a Sprachbund.

The Uto-Aztecan map, as you can probably divine from the name, is a Great Basin family north of the border, including Comanche, Shoshone, and the Ute and Piute languages. South of the border is a bundle of languages spoken in the Aztec empire. I'm otherwise a little less interested in Mexican Indian languages, but of course, the current boundary between Mexico and America didn't matter before there was a Mexico or an America, so they often straddled the border. It's usually believed to have formed as a proto-language on the southwestern Mexico/US border, but that's just based on the fact that that's where it is now; it could have formed anywhere and moved, as many of these languages obviously have done in prehistory.

The Chichimeca Languages may not have been related to each other. These central Mexican languages are the equivalent of the Greek and Roman designation of "barbarian" although even less precise, from the point of the view of the Aztecs. It's also not clear to what extent the vague, handwavy Big Bend area Texan and Mexican tribes that were not part of the Apacheria or Navajo are related to either them or other nearby groups. The Meso-American language area was famous for being somewhat areal, with features that were shared by contact rather than genetics. The map below is the same as above, but with more areal languages and families added to it. Because most of these are south of the border, I'm both less familiar and less interested in them. The Chichimeca languages are the brownish ones in the central Mexico area. The lime green Mayan family is also notable, as well as the dark gray-black Yuman family of southern California and Arizona and Baja California.

Salishan or Salish is a geographically small group of PNW tribes in modern day southwestern Canada, Washington and Idaho, etc.. Because of the richness of the natural fisheries in the region, they were quite populous for their constrained geography, however. Tillamook is one famous example.

Finally, the Muskogean family of the American southeast is the largest family of the southern colonies, and one famous for many well-known tribes and groups like the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole and Creek. While not prevalent in peninsular Florida (which was populated by isolates that are poorly known now) it otherwise made up most of the American Southeast. Some other Gulf Coast isolates that are geographically very constrained make up smaller islands here and there, especially in the "hole" noted below in southern Mississippi, Alabama and the western Florida panhandle.

In summary, the linguistic diversity of the pre-contact North American landscape is strong evidence that there is no overly simplistic migration theory, regardless of which one(s) you prefer. Genetics seems to support this as well, although many Injuns are not super keen on genetic studies, they reject genetic evidence as evidence of tribal identity and are kinda of generally skeptical of "paleface science" in general. Regardless, it's clear that multiple waves of peoples who were both genetically and linguistically distinct made up the pre-contact population. And even to the extent that we can approximate the ethno-linguistic groups on the eve of European contact, it doesn't necessarily mean that much, as its clear that there was a lot of movement among peoples both prior to and after contact, absorption, adoption of different ways of life (Plains Indian light cavalry and teepee living seems to be almost materially identical across multiple unrelated ethno-linguistic groups, for example—the pre-Columbian and early Columbian Mound Builders are also presumably assimilated from various ethno-linguistic groups) and no doubt population and cultural replacement happened a ton, just as we're starting to realize how much that happened in the Old World too.