Essentially, academicians and folklorists created a caricature of North America's past. A few big tribes, created by the assimilation of the remnants of the Indigenous American Holocaust, eventually became "federally recognized tribes" and ultimately state mascots. Broad swaths of the Southeast and Midwest were labeled to be occupied by these tribes, even though place names could not be translated by the dictionaries of those tribes. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, various cliques of academicians promoted their state mascot Injuns in textbooks and professional conferences. The real history of the Southeast is extremely complex and includes the interactions of numerous ethnic groups over a long period of time.