The 7 Clans' Founding

Lore & Background

The founding of the Seven Clans is best understood as a slow wound healing into a scar. After the nuclear exchanges rendered most of the old world's infrastructure toxic and the majority of the population extinct, those who survived on the surface faced a choice: scavenge the ruins and slowly die of radiation, or adapt. Over what the show implies to be several decades, small bands of survivors carved out territories, developed methods for filtering water, growing food in irradiated soil, and building shelter. These bands coalesced into the clans we see in Season 2, each with a distinct identity tied to its geography—mountain valleys, river plains, forested highlands—and its own leadership traditions.

The Sky People represent the most dramatic fork in that story. Whether driven by a desire to escape the worst of the ground-level radiation, a spiritual conviction, or a political schism, a faction of survivors took to the floating islands that drift above the cloud layer. Over generations, they developed an entirely separate culture, technology, and social hierarchy, viewing the ground clans with a mixture of pity and condescension. The Sky People's isolation made them, in many ways, the most 'Ark-like' of the clans—structured, hierarchical, and convinced of their own superiority.

The Council of Clans emerged as a governing body to manage disputes, trade, and shared defense among the ground groups. By the time the 100 crash-land in the ruins of the old world, the Council is an established institution, though its authority is tested almost immediately by the arrival of outsiders who carry weapons, technology, and the dangerous belief that they own the ground simply because they fell from the sky. The founding story, then, is not just about how the clans came to be; it is about how a fragile, hard-won peace was built in the absence of the old world, and how quickly that peace can be shattered by those who never had to earn their place on the earth.

In Their Own Story

The elders say it was the third generation after the Fall that the first clans truly took shape. A woman named only as the River Keeper in the oldest ground songs led her people down from the high plateau to the valley where the water still ran clean. She divided the group: the young and strong would guard the northern passes, the elders and children would tend the fields, and those who could not bear the thin air would climb to the islands above. No one argued. There was no council yet, no banner, no name. There was only the river, the smoke of the first fires, and the understanding that if they scattered, they would die the way the old world had died—alone.

Decades later, when a girl from the sky islands lands in the valley with a group of frightened teenagers and a gun that makes the air crackle, the River Keeper's great-granddaughter watches from the tree line. She does not speak. She does not need to. The ground remembers who it belongs to, and the sky has forgotten what it cost to leave.

Reader's Guide

According to ground-clan oral tradition, the Seven Clans were not founded in a single day but emerged over roughly two to three generations after the nuclear war, as scattered survivor-groups consolidated around defensible territories and shared water sources. The oldest songs speak of a 'first division' in which a faction chose the sky islands over the poisoned lowlands, creating the Sky People as a distinct lineage. This separation is treated in clan mythology as both a tragedy and a necessity.

The Council of Clans is described in in-universe records as a later institutional development, formed to mediate disputes between the ground groups. Its exact founding date is not given a precise year in canon; different clans reference different 'first councils,' suggesting the body evolved organically rather than being established by a single decree.

When the 100 arrive, the clans' understanding of their own history is immediately challenged. The Ark's narrative—that the ground is dead, that humanity's future is in the sky—directly contradicts everything the clans have built. Characters like Clarke and Bellamy must reckon with the fact that their entire civilization's founding myth was a lie, and that the 'new world' they were promised already had old-world inhabitants with their own histories, laws, and grievances.

Fan speculation often attempts to assign specific founding dates or name the original leaders of each clan, but the show never confirms these details. What is established in canon is the broad shape: a post-war diaspora, a sky/ground split, a council system, and a fragile peace disrupted by the 100's arrival. The rest remains, fittingly, in the realm of the clans' own songs and stories.

Did You Know?

• The 100 were sent to the ground under the explicit belief that it was uninhabitable, making the clans' existence a complete surprise to the Ark's leadership and the young people themselves.
• The Sky People's culture and social hierarchy closely mirror the Ark's own structure, suggesting they may have been a splinter faction that carried Ark-era norms into the ground world.
• The Council of Clans functions as a governing body with real political power, meaning the ground was not a lawless wasteland but a society with established institutions before the 100 ever landed.
• The clans' founding is told through oral tradition and in-universe dialogue rather than a single exposition scene, meaning different characters and seasons emphasize different aspects of the history.