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 American Indian Movement (AIM) is a Native American advocacy group in the United States, founded in July 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. AIM was initially formed to address American Indian sovereignty, treaty issues, spirituality, and leadership, while simultaneously addressing incidents of police harassment and racism against Native Americans forced to move off of reservations and away from tribal culture by the 1950s era federal government termination policies, created in the 1930s but never enforced. "As independent citizens and taxpayers, without good education or experience, most 'terminated' Indians were reduced within a few years to widespread illness and utter poverty, whether or not they were relocated to cities" from the reservations. The various specific issues concerning Native American urban communities like Minneapolis, also known as "red ghettos", are high unemployment levels, racism, police harassment, poverty, and substandard housing. Aim's overriding objective is to create "real economic independence for the Indians". From its beginnings in Minnesota, AIM soon attracted members from across the United States and Canada.

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Stucco relief at the Maya ruins at Palenque, as drawn by Ricardo Almendáriz at the time of the Del Rio expedition in 1787

image credit: Library of Congress

General images

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

Image 1Shaman of the Cofán people from the Amazonian forest in present-day Ecuador (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 2The ancient mesoamerican engraving of maize now on display at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 3A Quechua woman and child in the Sacred Valley in Cuzco Region, Peru (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 4The tomato (jitomate, in central Mexico) was later cultivated by the pre-Hispanic civilizations of Mexico. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 5A bison hunt depicted in a painting by George Catlin (1844) (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 6A 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 7Maya glyphs in stucco now on display at Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 8An Indigenous man playing a panpipe, antara, or siku (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 9Areas of Indigenous peoples in North America at time of European colonization (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 10An 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 11A schematic illustration of maternal (mtDNA) gene-flow in and out of Beringia, from 25,000 years ago to present
Image 12A Navajo man on horseback in present-day Monument Valley in Arizona (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 13Language 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 14Wayuu women in the Guajira Peninsula, which comprises parts of Colombia and Venezuela (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 15Indigenous Pipil women dancing in the traditional Procession of Palms in Panchimalco, El Salvador (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 16A Mayan woman (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 17Indigenous peoples textile art in 1995 by Julia Pingushat, including Inuk, Arviat, Nunavut, Canada, wool, and embroidery floss (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 18An Indigenous woman in traditional dress near Cochabamba, Bolivia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 19A Choctaw artist in present-day Oklahoma (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 20Areas of Indigenous peoples in South and Central America at the time of European colonization (in Spanish) (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 21A 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 22Maya women from present-day Guatemala (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 23Quechua women in festive dress on Taquile Island on Lake Titicaca, west of Peru (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 24Indigenous people at a farm plantation in Minas Gerais in present-day Brazil, c. 1824 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 25A qpGraph on the formation of Ancient Paleo-Siberians and Native American populations. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 26A 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 27The West Indies in relation to the continental Americas (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 28A Mapuche man in present-day Chile (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 29An Indigenous Terena man from present-day Brazil (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 30A Warao family traveling in their canoe in Venezuela (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 31The Rarámuri marathon in Urique (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 32A Mapuche man and woman; the Mapuche make up about 85% of Indigenous population that live in Chile. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 33The bean is native to Mexico and Central America and later began to be cultivated in South America. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 34"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 35Owners of a roadside cafe near Cachi, Salta Province, Argentina (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 36The Kogi, descendants of the Tairona, are a culturally intact, largely pre-Columbian era society. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 37Members of an uncontacted tribe encountered in Acre in present-day Brazil in 2009 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 38A 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 39Principal component analysis showing the Native American cluster in other Eurasian populations. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 40A Huichol woman from Zacatecas, Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 41Tunumiit Inuit couple from Kulusuk, Greenland (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 42A carnival with Tzeltal people in Tenejapa Municipality, Chiapas (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 43Chimu culture feather pectoral, feathers, reed, copper, silver, hide, cordage, c. 1350–1450 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 44Guambía people relaxing in Colombia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 45Evo Morales, an Aymara member and former President of Bolivia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 46The major indigenous language families of much of present-day South America and Panama (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)

Selected biography

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, also known simply as Juan Diego (Spanish pronunciation: [ˌxwanˈdjeɣo]; 1474–1548), was a Nahua peasant and Marian visionary. He is said to have been granted apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe on four occasions in December 1531: three at the hill of Tepeyac and a fourth before don Juan de Zumárraga, then bishop of Mexico. The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, located at the foot of Tepeyac, houses the cloak (tilmahtli) that is traditionally said to be Juan Diego's, and upon which the image of the Virgin is said to have been miraculously impressed as proof of the authenticity of the apparitions.

Juan Diego's visions and the imparting of the miraculous image, as recounted in oral and written colonial sources such as the Huei tlamahuiçoltica, are together known as the Guadalupe event (Spanish: el acontecimiento Guadalupano), and are the basis of the veneration of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This veneration is ubiquitous in Mexico, prevalent throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, and increasingly widespread beyond. As a result, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is now one of the world's major Christian pilgrimage destinations, receiving 22 million visitors in 2010. (Full article...)

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Did you know…

... that Lutheran priest Henrik Lund wrote Greenland's nation anthem, Nunarput utoqqarsuanngoravit, in the indigenous Greenlandic language?
... that the artwork of full-blood Tsimshian photographer Benjamin Haldane has enjoyed a revival after his glass plate negatives were discovered in an Alaskan dump?
... that in traditional Plains hide painting, Native American women painted abstract, geometric designs while men painted representational, narrative images?

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Machu Picchu

image credit: Martin St-Amant

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