Portal:Indigenous peoples of the Americas

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 goldsmithing. (Full article...)

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The Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes, against the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The battle, which occurred June 25–26, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana Territory, was the most prominent action of the Great Sioux War of 1876. It was an overwhelming victory for the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, led by several major war leaders, including Crazy Horse and Chief Gall, inspired by the visions of Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake). The U.S. 7th Cavalry, including the Custer Battalion, a force of 700 men led by George Armstrong Custer, suffered a severe defeat. Five of the 7th Cavalry's twelve companies were annihilated; Custer was killed, as were two of his brothers, a nephew, and a brother-in-law. The total U.S. casualty count, including scouts, was 268 dead and 55 injured.

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American Buffalo Gold Bullion coin, based on the Indian Head nickel design of James Earle Fraser, modelled by three different native people, including Iron Tail

image credit: United States Mint

General images

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

Image 1An 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 2Shaman of the Cofán people from the Amazonian forest in present-day Ecuador (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 3"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 4Chimu culture feather pectoral, feathers, reed, copper, silver, hide, cordage, c. 1350–1450 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 5Evo Morales, an Aymara member and former President of Bolivia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 6A 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 7The Kogi, descendants of the Tairona, are a culturally intact, largely pre-Columbian era society. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 8A Warao family traveling in their canoe in Venezuela (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 9Language 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 10The Rarámuri marathon in Urique (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 11A representation of the domesticated plant species cultivated by Indigenous peoples have influenced the crops that were produced globally. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 12Indigenous people at a farm plantation in Minas Gerais in present-day Brazil, c. 1824 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 13A bison hunt depicted in a painting by George Catlin (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 14Maya women from present-day Guatemala (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 15A 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 16Maya glyphs in stucco now on display at Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 17A carnival with Tzeltal people in Tenejapa Municipality, Chiapas (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 18The ancient mesoamerican engraving of maize now on display at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 19A schematic illustration of maternal (mtDNA) gene-flow in and out of Beringia, from 25,000 years ago to present
Image 20The West Indies in relation to the continental Americas (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 21An Indigenous man playing a panpipe, antara, or siku (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 22A Navajo man on horseback in present-day Monument Valley in Arizona (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 23Areas of Indigenous peoples in North America at time of European colonization (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 24Principal component analysis showing the Native American cluster in other Eurasian populations. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 25Guambía people relaxing in Colombia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 26An Indigenous Terena man from present-day Brazil (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 27A Mapuche man and woman; the Mapuche make up about 85% of Indigenous population that live in Chile. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 28Indigenous Pipil women dancing in the traditional Procession of Palms in Panchimalco, El Salvador (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 29A Quechua woman and child in the Sacred Valley in Cuzco Region, Peru (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 30A Huichol woman from Zacatecas, Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 31The tomato (jitomate, in central Mexico) was later cultivated by the pre-Hispanic civilizations of Mexico. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 32Members of an uncontacted tribe encountered in Acre in present-day Brazil in 2009 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 33A Mayan woman (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 34Owners of a roadside cafe near Cachi, Salta Province, Argentina (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 35Indigenous peoples textile art in 1995 by Julia Pingushat, including Inuk, Arviat, Nunavut, Canada, wool, and embroidery floss (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 36The major indigenous language families of much of present-day South America and Panama (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 37A qpGraph on the formation of Ancient Paleo-Siberians and Native American populations. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 38A 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 39Wayuu women in the Guajira Peninsula, which comprises parts of Colombia and Venezuela (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 40Quechua women in festive dress on Taquile Island on Lake Titicaca, west of Peru (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 41A Choctaw artist in present-day Oklahoma (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 42A Mapuche man in present-day Chile (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 43An Indigenous woman in traditional dress near Cochabamba, Bolivia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 44Tunumiit Inuit couple from Kulusuk, Greenland (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 45The bean is native to Mexico and Central America and later began to be cultivated in South America. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)

Selected biography

Ishi (c. 1860 – March 25, 1916) was the last member of the Yahi, a group of the Yana people of the U.S. state of California. Widely acclaimed in his time as the "last wild Indian" in America, Ishi lived most of his life completely outside modern culture. At about 49 years of age, in 1911, he emerged from "the wild" near Oroville, California, leaving his ancestral homeland, present-day Tehama County, near the foothills of Lassen Peak, known to Ishi as Wa ganu p'a.

Ishi means "man" in the Yana language. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave this name to the man because it was rude to ask someone's name in the Yahi culture. When asked his name, he said: "I have none, because there were no people to name me," meaning that no Yahi had ever spoken his name. He was taken in by anthropologists at the University of California, who both studied him and hired him as a research assistant. He lived most of his remaining five years in a university building in San Francisco.

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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?

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Machu Picchu

image credit: Martin St-Amant

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