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 the peoples that inhabited the Americas before the arrival of European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now 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...)

Selected article

The Aztec Pyramid at St. Cecilia Acatitlan, Mexico State.

The Aztec /ˈæztɛk/ people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14th to 16th centuries. The Nahuatl words aztecatl [asˈtekat͡ɬ] (singular) and aztecah [asˈtekaʔ] (plural) mean "people from Aztlán", a mythological place for the Nahuatl-speaking culture of the time, and later adopted as the word to define the Mexica people. Often the term "Aztec" refers exclusively to the Mexica people of Tenochtitlan (now the location of Mexico City), situated on an island in Lake Texcoco, who referred to themselves as Mēxihcah Tenochcah [meːˈʃiʔkaʔ teˈnot͡ʃkaʔ] or Cōlhuah Mexihcah [ˈkoːlwaʔ meːˈʃiʔkaʔ].

Sometimes the term also includes the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan's two principal allied city-states, the Acolhuas of Texcoco and the Tepanecs of Tlacopan, who together with the Mexica formed the Aztec Triple Alliance which controlled what is often known as the "Aztec Empire". In other contexts, Aztec may refer to all the various city states and their peoples, who shared large parts of their ethnic history and cultural traits with the Mexica, Acolhua and Tepanecs, and who often also used the Nahuatl language as a lingua franca. In this meaning it is possible to talk about an Aztec civilization including all the particular cultural patterns common for most of the peoples inhabiting Central Mexico in the late postclassic period.

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Selected image

Pyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacán, México

image credit: Diego Delso

General images

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

Image 1An Indigenous Terena man from present-day Brazil (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 2A bison hunt depicted by George Catlin (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 3A Choctaw artist in present-day Oklahoma (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 4Quechua women in festive dress on Taquile Island on Lake Titicaca, west of Peru (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 5The tomato (jitomate, in central Mexico) was later cultivated by the pre-Hispanic civilizations of Mexico. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 6The West Indies in relation to the continental Americas (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 7Areas of Indigenous peoples in North America at time of European colonization (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 8Guambía people relaxing in Colombia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 9An 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 10A Navajo man on horseback in present-day Monument Valley in Arizona (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 11A 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 12A Mayan woman (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 13Maya women from present-day Guatemala (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 14Bill Reid's sculpture The Raven and the First Men now on display at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver; the Raven represents the Trickster figure common to many mythologies. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 15A Mapuche man and woman; the Mapuche make up about 85% of Indigenous population that live in Chile. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 16Evo Morales, an Aymara member and former President of Bolivia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 17A Quechua woman and child in the Sacred Valley in Cuzco Region, Peru (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 18Shaman of the Cofán people from the Amazonian forest in present-day Ecuador (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 19A Mapuche man in present-day Chile (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 20Maya glyphs in stucco now on display at Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 21A Huichol woman from Zacatecas, Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 22An Indigenous woman in traditional dress near Cochabamba, Bolivia (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 23Language 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 24Tunumiit Inuit couple from Kulusuk, Greenland (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 25The Rarámuri marathon in Urique (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 26A carnival with Tzeltal people in Tenejapa Municipality, Chiapas (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 27An Indigenous man playing a panpipe, antara, or siku (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 28Indigenous people at a farm plantation in Minas Gerais in present-day Brazil, c. 1824 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 29Indigenous Pipil women dancing in the traditional Procession of Palms in Panchimalco, El Salvador (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 30A Warao family traveling in their canoe in Venezuela (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 31The 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 32Chimu culture feather pectoral, feathers, reed, copper, silver, hide, cordage, c. 1350–1450 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 33Wayuu women in the Guajira Peninsula, which comprises parts of Colombia and Venezuela (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 34Principal component analysis showing the Native American cluster in other Eurasian populations. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 35A schematic illustration of maternal (mtDNA) gene-flow in and out of Beringia, from 25,000 years ago to present
Image 36A Navajo boy in the desert in present-day Monument Valley in Arizona with the Three Sisters in the background in 2007 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 37The bean is native to Mexico and Central America and later began to be cultivated in South America. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 38The major indigenous language families of much of present-day South America and Panama (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 39Members of an uncontacted tribe encountered in Acre in present-day Brazil in 2009 (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 40"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 41Indigenous peoples textile art in 1995 by Julia Pingushat, including Inuk, Arviat, Nunavut, Canada, wool, and embroidery floss (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 42Some Inuit on a traditional qamutiik dog sled in Kinngait, Nunavut, Canada (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 43The ancient mesoamerican engraving of maize now on display at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 44Owners of a roadside cafe near Cachi, Salta Province, Argentina (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)
Image 45The Kogi, descendants of the Tairona, are a culturally intact, largely pre-Columbian era society. (from Indigenous peoples of the Americas)

Selected biography

SE-QUO-YAH – a lithograph from History of the Indian Tribes of North America. This lithograph is from the portrait painted by Charles Bird King in 1828.

Sequoyah (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ Ssiquoya, as he signed his name, or ᏎᏉᏯ Se-quo-ya, as his name is often spelled today in Cherokee) (c. 1770–1840), named in English George Gist or George Guess, was a Cherokee silversmith. In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible. This was the only time in recorded history that a member of a pre-literate people independently created an effective writing system. After seeing its worth, the people of the Cherokee Nation rapidly began to use his syllabary and officially adopted it in 1825. Their literacy rate quickly surpassed that of surrounding European-American settlers.

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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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Chichen Itza

image credit: Daniel Schwen

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American indigenous language Wikipedias

Avañe'ẽ (Warani) · Aymar aru (Aymara) · ᏣᎳᎩ (Cherokee) · Chahta (Choctaw) · ᐃᔨᔫ (Cree) · ᐃᓄᒃ (Inuktitut) · Iñupiak · Kalaallisut (Greenlandic Inuit) · Mvskoke (Muscogee) · Nahuatlahtolli · Diné bizaad (Navajo) · Qhichwa Simi · Tsêhesenêstsestôtse (Cheyenne)

Indigenous languages in Wikimedia Incubators: Alabama · Blackfoot · Chinook Jargon · Choctaw · Creek · Lakota · Micmac · Mohawk · Nheengatu · Northwestern Ojibwa · O'odham · Shoshoni · Unami-Lenape · Wüne pakina (Mapudungun) · Yucatec Maya · Central Alaskan Yup'ik · Zuni

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