The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Fort Hall are comprised of the eastern and western bands of the Northern Shoshone and the Bannock, or Northern Paiute, bands. Ancestral lands of both tribes occupied vast regions of land encompassing present-day Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and into Canada. The tribes are culturally related, and though both descend from the Numic family of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic phylum, their languages are dialectically separate. When the Northern Paiutes left the Nevada and Utah regions for southern Idaho in the 1600s, they began to travel with the Shoshones in pursuit of buffalo. They became known as the Bannocks.
