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 gold smithing. (Full article...)

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The Arapaho (in French: Arapahos, Gens de Vache) are a tribe of Native Americans historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota. The Arapaho language, Heenetiit, is an Algonquian language closely related to Gros Ventre (Ahe/A'ananin), whose people are seen as an early offshoot of the Arapaho. Blackfeet and Cheyenne are the other Algonquian-speakers on the Plains, but their languages are quite different from Arapaho.

By the 1850s, Arapaho bands formed two tribes: the Northern Arapaho and Southern Arapaho. Since 1878 the Northern Arapaho have lived with the Eastern Shoshone on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and are federally recognized as the Arapahoe Tribe of the Wind River Reservation. The Southern Arapaho live with the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma. Together their members are enrolled as the federally recognized Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.

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Pyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacán, México

image credit: Diego Delso

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General images

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

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

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Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, also known simply as Juan Diego (Spanish pronunciation: [ˌxwanˈdjeɣo]; 1474–1548), was a Chichimec 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 even though the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma only has 519 members, they created the first and only eagle rehabilitation center in Oklahoma?
... that among the Taíno people of the Caribbean, a zemi is a spirit or a sculpture representing the spirit?
... that critically acclaimed Bolivian Aymara painter, Alejandro Mario Yllanes, disappeared from New York after winning, but not claiming, the Guggenheim fellowship in 1946?

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First day in school for the new pupils in first grade at the Prinsesse Margrethe School in Upernavik, Greenland. All pupils are wearing the national costumes of Greenland

image credit: Kim Hansen

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