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The Indigenous peoples of the Americas Portal

Current distribution of Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are groups of people native to a specific region that inhabited the Americas before the arrival of European settlers in the 15th century and the ethnic groups who continue to identify themselves with those peoples.

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are diverse; some Indigenous peoples were historically hunter-gatherers, while others traditionally practice agriculture and aquaculture. In some regions, Indigenous peoples created pre-contact monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, city-states, chiefdoms, states, kingdoms, republics, confederacies and empires. These societies had varying degrees of knowledge of engineering, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, writing, physics, medicine, planting and irrigation, geology, mining, metallurgy, sculpture and gold smithing. (Full article...)

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The Trail of Tears is a name given to the forced relocation of Native American nations from southeastern parts of the United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The removal included many members of the following tribes, who did not wish to assimilate: Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations, among others, from their homelands to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. The Native Americans who chose to stay and assimilate were allowed to become citizens in their states and of the U.S. The phrase "Trail of Tears" originated from a description of the removal of the Choctaw Nation in 1831.

Many Native Americans suffered from exposure, disease and starvation on the route to their destinations. Many died, including 2,000-6,000 of 16,542 relocated Cherokee. European Americans and African American freedmen and slaves also participated in the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek and Seminole forced relocations.

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Doña Ramona, a Seri shaman from Punta Chueca, Sonora, Mexico.

image credit: Tomás Castelazo

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General images

The following are images from various Indigenous peoples of the Americas-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1A map showing the origin of the first wave of humans into the Americas, including the Ancestral Northern Eurasian, which represent a distinct Paleolithic Siberian population, and the Northeast Asians, which are an East Asian-related group. The admixture happened somewhere in Northeast Siberia. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 2A Warao family traveling in their canoe in Venezuela (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 3The ancient mesoamerican engraving of maize now on display at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 4Principal component analysis showing the Native American cluster in other Eurasian populations. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 5An Indigenous woman in traditional dress near Cochabamba, Bolivia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 6The tomato (jitomate, in central Mexico) was later cultivated by the pre-Hispanic civilizations of Mexico. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 7Indigenous Pipil women dancing in the traditional Procession of Palms in Panchimalco, El Salvador (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 8Evo Morales, an Aymara member and former President of Bolivia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 9A Mapuche man and woman; the Mapuche make up about 85% of Indigenous population that live in Chile. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 10A Navajo man on horseback in present-day Monument Valley in Arizona (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 11Language families of Indigenous peoples in North America shown across present-day Canada, Greenland, the United States, and northern Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 12The West Indies in relation to the continental Americas (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 13An illustration in Florentine Codex, compiled between 1540 and 1585, depicting the Nahua peoples suffering from smallpox during the conquest-era in central Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 14The Rarámuri marathon in Urique (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 15Maya glyphs in stucco now on display at Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 16An Indigenous Terena man from present-day Brazil (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 17Members of an uncontacted tribe encountered in Acre in present-day Brazil in 2009 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 18A carnival with Tzeltal people in Tenejapa Municipality, Chiapas (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 19The Kogi, descendants of the Tairona, are a culturally intact, largely pre-Columbian era society. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 20An Indigenous man playing a panpipe, antara, or siku (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 21Indigenous peoples textile art in 1995 by Julia Pingushat, including Inuk, Arviat, Nunavut, Canada, wool, and embroidery floss (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 22A Mayan woman (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 23The bean is native to Mexico and Central America and later began to be cultivated in South America. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 24Quechua women in festive dress on Taquile Island on Lake Titicaca, west of Peru (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 25Indigenous people at a farm plantation in Minas Gerais in present-day Brazil, c. 1824 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 26"The Maiden", one of the discovered Llullaillaco mummies, a preserved Inca human sacrifice from around the year 1500. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 27Owners of a roadside cafe near Cachi, Salta Province, Argentina (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 28A bison hunt depicted by George Catlin (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 29Maya women from present-day Guatemala (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 30A Quechua woman and child in the Sacred Valley in Cuzco Region, Peru (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 31A Choctaw artist in present-day Oklahoma (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 32A Mapuche man in present-day Chile (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 33Chimu culture feather pectoral, feathers, reed, copper, silver, hide, cordage, c. 1350–1450 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 34Tunumiit Inuit couple from Kulusuk, Greenland (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 35A map of Canada showing the percent of self-reported indigenous identity (First Nations, Inuit, Métis) by census division, according to the 2021 Canadian census (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 36Wayuu women in the Guajira Peninsula, which comprises parts of Colombia and Venezuela (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 37A schematic illustration of maternal (mtDNA) gene-flow in and out of Beringia, from 25,000 years ago to present
Image 38A Huichol woman from Zacatecas, Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 39A Navajo boy in the desert in present-day Monument Valley in Arizona with the "Three Sisters" rock formation in the background in 2007 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 40Areas of Indigenous peoples in North America at time of European colonization (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 41Shaman of the Cofán people from the Amazonian forest in present-day Ecuador (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 42The domesticated plant species that were cultivated by the Indigenous peoples have influenced the crops that were produced globally. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 43The major indigenous language families of much of present-day South America and Panama (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 44Guambía people relaxing in Colombia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)

Selected biography

Buffy Sainte-Marie, OC (born February 20, 1941) is a Canadian-American Cree singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism.

She founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans. She has won recognition and many awards and honours for both her music and her work in education and social activism.

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Did you know…

... that the Cascajal Block, a serpentinite slab from the Olmec civilization, was dated to the which early first millennium BCE and may represent the earliest writing system in the Americas?
... that Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox) won the 1912 Olympic gold medals for the pentathlon and decathlon?
...that underwater panthers were creatures appearing in the mythology of a number of Native American traditions, which combined the features of mountain lions or lynx with those of snakes, and were believed to inhabit the deepest parts of lakes and rivers?