A second, minority theory has the proto-Keresiouans arriving by sea at the mouths of the Mississippi, the Savannah, the rivers of the Carolina coast, Chesapeake Bay and the St. Lawrence River, then migrating their way up these rivers, their language diverging over a period of years, decades or centuries into mutually unintelligible dialects.

One problem with this theory is that there are only three known seafaring groups among the Amerinds: the primitive Ciboney, who may have moved from Florida through the Bahamas to the Greater Antilles, the highly organized Arawaks, who island-hopped their way north from Venezuela during the first millennium of the common era, and the opportunistic Caribs, who didn’t start biting the heels of the Antillean Arawaks until the fourteenth century.

The Arawaks accorded their women a relatively high place in society; some even became caciques, or chiefs; many of the Keresiouan-speaking nations also made a place for women in their councils and granted them a number of rights denied to women of Algonquian-speaking nations.