To begin with, the popular conception of Native American societies as primarily nomadic isn't accurate. That's derived mostly from Plains cultures, which resisted Euro-American influence throughout the 1800s and dominated the Euro-American imagination in Western films and novels through the 1900s.

The nation focused on in Dances With Wolves, for example, are the Lakota. There are numerous social divisions within Lakota society, so you can divide up the "tribe" in different ways. At the topmost level, there's the Oceti Sankowin - the Seven Council Fires, aka the Great Sioux Nation. While it continues to have symbolic importance today, at this level it was most important in the 1700s and earlier. The Oceti Sankowin is composed of seven tunwan or "villages" which likely have their origins as exactly that - seven villages that united back when the Lakota and Dakota lived as farmers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The Lakota, or more properly the Thithunwan, are just one of this tunwans. The Dakota make up the other six. The Lakota are further divide into seven oyate (the Oglala, Hunkpapa, etc.), which an be further divided into tipospaye ("bands"), which can be further divided into wicoti ("camps"), which can be further divided into tiwahe (families).

If you're thinking of a group of Lakota numbering between 10-50, you're probably thinking of a wicoti. That's a normal range for them. The population estimates for the Thithunwan oyate in the 1880s is around 16,000. For the Oceti Sankowin in the mid-1600s, before the seven tunwans began drifting apart, the estimated population was nearly 30,000.

Now, to turn our attention eastward, I want to focus on two other historic nations that we don't hear much about these days: Coosa and Apalachee. These are both Southern Appalachian Mississippian nations that existed (and continue to exist in altered forms) at the time of European contact.

In terms of geographic extent, Coosa was the largest Native nation in the region that we know of, stretching 300-400 miles along the southern Appalachians (depending on whether a nation to their north were vassals or allies - the historical record is ambiguous here). Despite having a large area, it seems to have been sparsely populated except. Most of the population was packed into a few densely settled valleys, with a total population estimate around 50,000. For the capital town of Coosa itself, the estimate is about about 5,000 people. Our most detailed accounts of Coosa come from the various chronicles of de Soto's entrada during the 1540s.

Apalachee had the opposite arrangement. The entire nation was packed into the area about 30 miles around modern-day Tallahassee (which gets its name from the abandoned farmland left behind by the Apalachee after they were defeated by the Creeks in Queen Anne's War). In the late Pre-Columbian era, the capital of the Apalachee appears to have been the Jackson Lake site, but around 1500, Jackson Lake was disbanded and two sister cities were built to replace it: Anhaica / Anhayca (modern day Tallahassee) and Ivitachuco (location unknown). In 1608, Martin Prieto, a Spanish priest went to Ivitachuco to negotiate a peace summit between the Apalachee and the Spanish-allied Timucua. He reported a population of 36,000 people in the city. It's uncertain how many were merely visiting for the summit, but it does more or less confirm a slightly earlier estimate from Spanish traders in the area that reported more than 30,000 people in the city. While we haven't found the site of Ivitachuco yet to confirm these numbers, if accurate, it'd put the population estimate for the entire Apalachee region above 65,000.