Everything about Indigenous Peoples Of America totally explained
The
indigenous peoples of the Americas are the
pre-Columbian inhabitants of the
Americas, their descendants, and many
ethnic groups who identify with those peoples. They are often also referred to as
Native Americans,
First Nations and by
Christopher Columbus' historical mistake
Indians, modernly disambiguated as the
American Indian race,
American Indians,
Amerindians,
Amerinds or
Red Indians.
According to the still-debated
New World migration model, a migration of humans from
Eurasia to the Americas took place via
Beringia, a
land bridge which formerly connected the two continents across what is now the
Bering Strait. The minimum time depth by which this migration had taken place is confirmed at c. 12,000 years ago, with the upper bound (or earliest period) remaining a matter of some unresolved contention. These early
Paleoamericans soon spread throughout the Americas, diversifying into many hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes. According to the oral histories of many of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, they've been living there since their genesis, described by a wide range of traditional
creation accounts.
Application of the term "
Indian" originated with
Christopher Columbus, who thought that he'd arrived in the
East Indies, while seeking
India. This has served to imagine a kind of racial or cultural unity for the aboriginal peoples of the Americas. Once created, the unified "Indian" was codified in law, religion, and politics. The unitary idea of "Indians" wasn't originally shared by indigenous peoples, but many now embrace the identity.
While some indigenous peoples of the Americas were historically
hunter-gatherers, many practiced
aquaculture and
agriculture. The impact of their
agricultural endowment to the world is a testament to their time and work in reshaping, taming, and cultivating the flora indigenous to the Americas. Some societies depended heavily on agriculture while others practiced a mix of farming, hunting, and gathering. In some regions the indigenous peoples created monumental
architecture, large-scale organized
cities,
chiefdoms,
states, and massive
empires.
History
Original peopling of the Americas
Scholars who follow the Bering Strait theory agree that most indigenous peoples of the Americas descended from people who probably
migrated from
Siberia across the
Bering Strait, anywhere between 9,000 and 50,000 years ago. The time frame and exact routes are still matters of debate, and the model faces continuous challenges.
A 2006 study (to be published in
Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology) reports new DNA-based research that links DNA retrieved from a 10,000-year-old fossilized tooth from an Alaskan island, with specific coastal tribes in
Tierra del Fuego,
Ecuador,
Mexico, and
California. Unique DNA markers found in the fossilized tooth were found only in these specific coastal tribes, and were not comparable to markers found in any other indigenous peoples in the Americas. This finding lends substantial credence to a migration theory that at least one set of early peoples moved south along the west coast of the Americas in boats. However, these results may be ambiguous, as there are other issues with DNA research and biological and cultural affiliation as outlined in Peter N. Jones' book
Respect for the Ancestors: Cultural Affiliation and Cultural Continuity in the American West.
One result of these waves of migration is that large groups of peoples with similar languages and perhaps physical characteristics as well, moved into various geographic areas of North, and then Central and South America. While these peoples have traditionally remained primarily loyal to their individual tribes, ethnologists have variously sought to group the myriad of tribes into larger entities which reflect common geographic origins, linguistic similarities, and lifestyles.
Remnants of a human settlement in
Monte Verde,
Chile dated to 12,500 years
B.P. (another layer at Monteverde has been tentatively dated to 33,000–35,000 years B.P.) suggests that southern Chile was settled by peoples who entered the Americas before the peoples associated with the Bering Strait migrations. It is suggested that a coastal route via canoes could have allowed rapid migration into the Americas.
The traditional view of a relatively recent migration has also been challenged by older findings of human remains in South America; some dating to perhaps even 30,000 years old or more. Some recent finds (notably the
Luzia Woman in
Lagoa Santa, Brazil) are claimed to be morphologically distinct from most Asians and are more similar to Africans, Melanesians and
Australian Aborigines. These
American Aborigines would have been later displaced or absorbed by the Siberian immigrants. The distinctive
Fuegian natives of
Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the American continent, are speculated to be partial remnants of those Aboriginal populations. These early immigrants would have either crossed the ocean by boat or traveled north along the Asian coast and entered America through the Northwest, well before the Siberian waves. This theory is presently viewed by many scholars as conjecture, as many areas along the proposed routes now lie underwater, making research difficult. Some scholars believe the earliest forensic evidence for early populations appears to more closely resemble Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders, and not those of Northeast Asia.
Scholars' estimates of the total population of the Americas before European contact vary enormously, from a low of 10 million to a high of 112 million. Some authors see
ideological underpinnings in this population debate. For example, Robert Royal writes that "estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe and/or
Western civilization often favoring wildly higher figures." Some scholars believe that most of the indigenous population resided in
Mesoamerica and South America, with approximately 10 percent residing in North America, prior to European colonization.
The
Solutrean hypothesis suggests an early
European migration into the Americas and that stone tool technology of the
Solutrean culture in prehistoric Europe may have later influenced the development of the
Clovis tool-making culture in the Americas. Some of its key proponents include Dr.
Dennis Stanford of the
Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Bruce Bradley of the
University of Exeter. In this hypothesis, peoples associated with the Solutrean culture migrated from
Ice Age Europe to
North America, bringing their methods of making stone tools with them and providing the basis for later Clovis technology found throughout North America. The hypothesis rests upon particular similarities in Solutrean and Clovis toolmaking styles, and the fact that no predecessors of Clovis technology have been found in Eastern Asia,
Siberia or
Beringia, areas from which or through which early Americans are known to have migrated.
American Indian creation legends tell of a variety of originations of their respective peoples. Some were "always there" or were created by gods or animals, some migrated from a specified compass point, and others came from "across the ocean".
Vine Deloria, Jr., author and
Nakota activist, cites some of the oral histories that claim an
in situ origin in his book
Red Earth, White Lies, rejecting the Bering Strait land bridge route. Deloria takes a
Young Earth position, arguing that Native Americans actually originated in the Americas.
Recent genetic research
An article in the American Journal of Human Genetics states "Our results strongly support the hypothesis that haplogroup X, together with the other four main mtDNA haplogroups, was part of the gene pool of a single Native American founding population; therefore they don't support models that propose haplogroup-independent migrations, such as the migration from Europe posed by the Solutrean hypothesis." The National Geographic
Genographic Project identified
haplogroup Q-M242 as the
YDNA male ancestor of the "Siberian Clan," some of whom remained in Asia, but that today "almost all Native Americans are descendants from this man."
European colonization
The European colonization of the Americas forever changed the lives, bloodlines and cultures of the peoples of the continent. The
Population history of American indigenous peoples postulates that
disease exposure, displacement, and
warfare may have diminished populations. The first indigenous group encountered by Columbus were the 250,000
Tainos of
Hispaniola who were the dominant culture in the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas. In thirty years, about 70% of the Tainos died. . They were not immune to European diseases, so outbreaks of
measles and
smallpox ravaged their population.
Reasons for the decline of the Native American populations are variously theorized to be from
diseases, conflicts with Europeans, and conflicts among
warring tribes. More recently, collective mobilization among the indigenous peoples in the Americas has required the incorporation of closely-knit local
communities into a broader national and international framework of political action.
Scholars now believe that, among the various contributing factors,
epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the American natives. After first contacts with
Europeans and
Africans, some believe that the death of 90 to 95% of the native population of the
New World was caused by
Old World diseases. Half the native population of
Hispaniola in 1518 was killed by
smallpox. Within a few years smallpox killed between 60% and 90% of the
Inca population, with other waves of European disease weakening them further. Smallpox was only the first epidemic.
Typhus (probably) in 1546,
influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589,
diphtheria in 1614,
measles in 1618—all ravaged the remains of Inca culture. Smallpox had killed millions of native inhabitants of
Mexico. Unintentionally introduced at Veracruz with the arrival of
Panfilo de Narvaez on
April 23,
1520, smallpox ravaged Mexico in the 1520s, killing 150,000 in
Tenochtitlán alone, including the emperor, and was credited with the victory of
Cortes over the
Aztec empire at Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) in 1521.
In 1633 in
Plymouth, Massachusetts, the
Native Americans were struck by the virus. As it had done elsewhere, the virus wiped out entire population groups of Native Americans. It reached
Lake Ontario in 1636, and the lands of the
Iroquois by 1679. During the 1770s, smallpox killed at least 30% of the
West Coast Native Americans. Smallpox epidemics in 1780–1782 and
1837–1838 brought devastation and drastic population
depletion among the
Plain Indians. By 1832, the federal government of the
United States established a
smallpox vaccination program for Native Americans (
The Indian Vaccination Act of 1832).
In
Brazil the
indigenous population has declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated 3 million to some 300,000 in 1997.
Later explorations of the Caribbean led to the discovery of the
Aruak peoples of the lesser Antilles. The culture was extinct by 1650. Only 500 had survived by the year 1550, though the bloodlines continued through the modern populace. In
Amazonia, indigenous societies weathered centuries of colonization
The
Spaniards and other Europeans brought
horses to the Americas. Some of these animals escaped and began to breed and increase their numbers in the wild. The re-introduction of the horse had a profound impact on Native American culture in the
Great Plains of North America and of
Patagonia in South America. This new mode of travel made it possible for some tribes to greatly expand their territories, exchange many goods with neighboring tribes, and more easily capture
game.
Agriculture
Over the course of thousands of years, a large array of plant species were domesticated, bred and cultivated by the indigenous peoples of the American continent. These species now constitute 50–60% of all crops in cultivation worldwide . In certain cases, the indigenous peoples developed entirely new species and strains through artificial selection, as was the case in the domestication and breeding of
maize from wild
teosinte grasses in the valleys of southern
Mexico. A great number of these agricultural products still retain native names (
Nahuatl and others) in the
English and
Spanish lexicons.
Many crops first domesticated by indigenous Americans are now produced and/or used globally. Largest among these is
maize or "corn", arguably the most important crop in the world . Other significant crops include
cassava,
squash (pumpkins, zucchini, marrow, acorn squash, butternut squash, others), the
pinto bean,
Phaseolus including most
common beans,
tepary beans and
lima beans were also all first domesticated and cultivated by indigenous peoples in the Americas); the
tomato, the
potatoes,
avocados,
peanuts,
cocoa beans (used to make
chocolate),
vanilla,
strawberries,
pineapples,
Peppers (species and varieties of
Capsicum, including
bell peppers,
jalapeños,
paprika and
chili peppers)
sunflower seeds,
rubber,
brazilwood,
chicle, some species of
cotton,
tobacco,
coca.
There is evidence that native peoples in the United States area were a few hundred years from domesticating the black bear (presumably for an oxen- or horse-like use)
Culture
Cultural practices in the Americas seem to have been mostly shared within geographical zones where otherwise unrelated peoples might adopt similar technologies and social organizations. An example of such a cultural area could be
Mesoamerica, where millennia of coexistence and shared development between the peoples of the region produced a fairly homogeneous culture with complex agricultural and social patterns. Another well-known example could be the North American plains area, where until the 19th century, several different peoples shared traits of
nomadic hunter-gatherers primarily based on buffalo hunting. Within the Americas, dozens of larger and hundreds of smaller culture areas can be identified.
Writing Systems
An independent origin and development of
writing is counted among the many achievements and innovations of pre-Columbian American cultures. The region of
Mesoamerica produced a number of
indigenous writing systems from the 1st millennium BCE onwards. What may be the earliest-known example in the Americas of an extensive text thought to be writing is by the
Cascajal Block. The Olmec hieroglyphs tablet has been indirectly dated from ceramic shards found in the same context to approximately 900 BCE, around the time that
Olmec occupation of
San Lorenzo began to wane.
The Maya
writing system (often called
hieroglyphs from a superficial resemblance to the
Ancient Egyptian writing) was a combination of
phonetic symbols and
logograms. It is most often classified as a
logographic or (more properly) a
logosyllabic writing system, in which
syllabic signs play a significant role. It is the only writing system of the Pre-Columbian New World which is known to completely represent the spoken language of its community. In total, the script has more than a thousand different
glyphs, although a few are variations of the same sign or meaning, and many appear only rarely or are confined to particular localities. At any one time, no more than around 500 glyphs were in use, some 200 of which (including variations) had a phonetic or syllabic interpretation.
Aztec codices (singular
codex) are
books written by
pre-Columbian and colonial-era
Aztecs. These codices provide some of the best primary sources for
Aztec culture. The pre-Columbian codices differ from European codices in that they're largely pictorial; they were not meant to symbolize spoken or written narratives. The colonial era codices not only contain
Aztec pictograms, but also
Classical Nahuatl (in the
Latin alphabet),
Spanish, and occasionally
Latin.
Music and art
Native American music in North America is almost entirely
monophonic, but there are notable exceptions. Traditional Native American music often includes
drumming but little other instrumentation, although
flutes are played by individuals. The tuning of these flutes isn't precise and depends on the length of the wood used and the hand span of the intended player, but the finger holes are most often around a whole step apart and, at least in Northern California, a flute wasn't used if it turned out to have an interval close to a half step.
Music from indigenous peoples of Central Mexico and Central America often was
pentatonic. Before the arrival of the Spaniards it was inseparable from religious festivities and included a large variety of percussion and wind instruments such as drums, flutes, sea snail shells (used as a kind of trumpet) and "rain" tubes. No remnants of pre-Columbian stringed instruments were found until archaeologists discovered a jar in Guatemala, attributed to the Maya of the Late Classic Era (600–900 AD), which depicts a stringed musical instrument which has since been reproduced. This instrument is astonishing in at least two respects. First, it's the only
stringed instrument known in the Americas prior to the introduction of European musical instruments. Second, when played, it produces a sound virtually identical to a jaguar's growl. A sample of this sound is available at the
Princeton Art Museum website
.
Art of the indigenous peoples of the Americas composes a major category in the world art collection. Contributions include
pottery,
paintings,
jewellery,
weavings,
sculptures,
basketry,
carvings and
hair pipes.
Demography of contemporary populations
The following table provides estimates of the per-country populations of indigenous people, and also those with part-indigenous ancestry, expressed as a percentage of the overall country population of each country that's comprised by indigenous peoples, and of people with partly indigenous descent. The total percentage obtained by adding both of these categories is also given (One should note however that these categories, especially the second one, are inconsistently defined and measured differently from country to country).
History and status by country
Argentina
Toba,
Wichí,
Mocoví,
Pilagá,
Chulupí,
Diaguita-
Calchaquí,
Kolla,
Guaraní (Tupí Guaraní and Avá Guaraní in the provinces of Jujuy and Salta, and Mbyá Guaraní in the province of Misiones),
Chorote (
Iyo'wujwa Chorote and
Iyojwa'ja Chorote),
Chané,
Tapieté,
Mapuche (probably the largest indigenous nation in Argentina) and
Tehuelche. The
Selknam (Ona) people is now virtually extinct in its pure form. The languages of the Diaguita, Tehuelche, and Selknam nations are now extinct or virtually extinct: the Cacán language (spoken by Diaguitas) in the 18th century, the Selknam language in the 20th century; whereas one Tehuelche language (Southern Tehuelche) is still spoken by a small handful of elderly people.
Belize
Mestizos (European with indigenous peoples) number about 45 percent of the population; unmixed
Maya make up another 6.5 percent. The
Garifuna, who came to Belize in the 1800s, originating from
St. Vincent and the Grenadines, with a mixed African,
Carib, and
Arawak ancestry make up another 5% of the population.
Bolivia
In
Bolivia about 2.5 million people speak
Quechua, 2.1 million speak
Aymara, while
Guaraní is only spoken by a few hundred thousand people. The languages are recognized; nevertheless, there are no official documents written in those languages. However, the constitutional reform in 1997 for the first time recognized Bolivia as a multilingual, pluri-ethnic society and introduced education reform. In 2005, for the first time in the country's history, an indigenous Aymara president,
Evo Morales, was elected.
Brazil
The Amerindians make up 0.4% of
Brazil's population, or about 700,000 people. Indigenous peoples are found in the entire territory of Brazil, although the majority of them live in Indian reservations in the North and Centre-Western part of the country. On 18 January 2007,
FUNAI reported that it had confirmed the presence of 67 different
uncontacted tribes in Brazil, up from 40 in 2005. With this addition Brazil has now overtaken the island of
New Guinea as the country having the largest number of uncontacted tribes.
Canada
The most commonly preferred term for the indigenous peoples of what is now
Canada is
Aboriginal peoples. Of these Aboriginal peoples who are not
Inuit or
Métis, "
First Nations" is the most commonly preferred term of self-identification. Aboriginal peoples make up approximately 3.8 percent of the Canadian population.
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Chile
Less than 5 percent of
Chileans belong to indigenous peoples, such as the
Mapuche in the country's central valley and lake district, and the Mapuche successfully fought off defeat in the first 300–350 years of Spanish rule during the
War of Arauco. Relation with the new Chilean Republic were good until the Chilean state decided to occupy their lands. During the
Occupation of Araucanía the Mapuche surrendered to the country's army in the 1880s. The former land was opened to settlement for mestizo and white Chileans. Conflict over Mapuche land rights continued until present days.
Colombia
Colombia's overwhelmingly
Mestizo and
Afro-Colombian population, Colombia's indigenous peoples nonetheless encompass at least 85 distinct cultures and more than 1,378,884 people. A variety of collective rights for indigenous peoples are recognized in the 1991 Constitution.
One of these is the
Muisca culture, a subset of the larger
Chibcha ethnic group, famous for their use of
gold, which led to the legend of
El Dorado. At the time of the
Spanish conquest, the Chibchas were the largest native civilization between the
Incas and the
Aztecs.
Costa Rica
Costa Rica was the site of many indigenous cultures, but only eight remain today:
Bribri,
Brunka,
Cabecar,
Chorotega,
Guaymi,
Huetar,
Maleku and
Terraba, also called
Teribe or
Naso.
Ecuador
Ecuador was the site of many indigenous cultures, and civilizations of different proportions. An early sedentary culture, known as the
Valdivia culture, developed in the coastal region, while the
Caras and the
Quitus unified to form an elaborate civilization that ended at the birth of the Capital Quito. The
Cañaris near Cuenca were the most advanced, and most feared by the Inca, due to their fierce resistance to the Incan expansion. Their architecture remains were later destroyed by Spaniards and the Incas. Many Amerindian natives still exist today living in isolation with little contact to the outerworld. Most natives remained unmixed in the fusion that occurred after colonization because they inhabited such remote areas like the jungle, and the Andes.
Many of the Cañaris, and other natives still occupy their ancestors' original locations.
Guatemala
Many of the indigenous peoples of
Guatemala are of
Maya heritage. Other groups are
Xinca people and
Garífuna.
Pure Maya account for some 40 percent of the population; although around 40 percent of the population speaks an indigenous language, those tongues (of which there are more than 20) enjoy no official status.
El Salvador
Much of El Salvador was home to the
Pipil,
Lenca, and a number of Maya. The Pipil lived in western
El Salvador and spoke
Nahuatl like their
Aztec and
Maya counterparts, and had many settlements there. The Pipil had no treasure but held land that had rich and fertile soil, good for farming, this both disappointed and brought attention to the Spaniards who were shocked not to find gold or jewels in
El Salvador like they did in other lands like
Guatemala or
Mexico, but later learned of the fertile land El Salvador had to offer and attempted to conquer it. At first the Pipil had repelled Spanish Attacks but after many other attacks they'd stopped fighting and many were sadly used for labor by Spaniards. Today many Pipil and Indigenous populations live in small towns of El Salvador like
Izalco and
Nahuizalco.
Mexico
The territory of modern-day
Mexico was home to numerous indigenous civilizations prior to the arrival of the Spanish
conquistadores: The
Olmecs, who flourished from between 1200 BCE to about 400 BCE in the coastal regions of the
Gulf of Mexico; the
Zapotecs and the
Mixtecs, who held sway in the mountains of
Oaxaca and the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec; the
Maya in the
Yucatán (and into neighbouring areas of contemporary
Central America); the Purepecha or
Tarascan in present day
Michoacán and surrounding areas, and the
Aztecs, who, from their central capital at
Tenochtitlan, dominated much of the centre and south of the country (and the non-Aztec inhabitants of those areas) when
Hernán Cortés first landed at
Veracruz.
In contrast to what was the general rule in the rest of
North America, the history of the colony of
New Spain was one of racial intermingling (
mestizaje).
Mestizos quickly came to account for a majority of the colony's population; however, significant pockets of pure-blood
indígenas (as the native peoples are now known) have survived to the present day.
With
mestizos numbering some 60 percent of the modern population, estimates for the numbers of unmixed indigenous peoples vary from a very modest 10 percent to a more liberal 30 percent of the population. The reason for this discrepancy may be the Mexican government's policy of using linguistic, rather than racial, criteria as the basis of classification.
In the states of
Chiapas and
Oaxaca and in the interior of the
Yucatán peninsula the majority of the population is indigenous. Large indigenous minorities, including
Nahuas,
Purépechas, and
Mixtecs are also present in the central regions of Mexico. In Northern Mexico indigenous people are a small minority: they're practically absent from the northeast but, in the northwest and central borderlands, include the
Tarahumara of
Chihuahua and the
Yaquis and
Seri of
Sonora. Many of the tribes from this region are also recognized Native American tribes from the U.S. Southwest such as the Yaqui and Kickapoo.
In particular, in areas such as
Chiapas—most famously, but also in
Oaxaca,
Puebla,
Guerrero, and other remote mountainous parts—indigenous communities have been left on the margins of national development for the past 500 years. Indigenous customs and uses enjoy no official status. The
Huichols of the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Zacatecas, and Durango are impeded by police forces in their ritual pilgrimages, and their religious observances are interfered with.
Nicaragua
The
Miskito are
Native American people in
Central America. Their territory expands from
Cape Cameron,
Honduras, to
Rio Grande,
Nicaragua along the
Miskito Coast. There is a native
Miskito language, but large groups speak
Miskito creole English, Spanish, Rama and others. The creole English came about through frequent contact with the British. Many are Christians.
Over the centuries the Miskito have intermarried with
escaped slaves who have sought refuge in Miskito communities. Traditional Miskito
society was highly structured, with a defined
political structure. There was a
king but he didn't have total power. Instead, the power was split between him, a
governor, a
general, and by the 1750s, an
admiral. Historical information on kings is often obscured by the fact that many of the kings were semi-
mythical.
Peru
Most
Peruvians are either indigenous or
mestizos (of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry). Peru has the largest indigenous population of South America, and its traditions and customs have shaped the way Peruvians live and see themselves today. Cultural citizenship—or what Renato Rosaldo has called, "the right to be different and to belong, in a democratic, participatory sense" (1996:243)—is not yet very well developed in Peru. This is perhaps no more apparent than in the country's Amazonian regions where indigenous societies continue to struggle against state-sponsored economic abuses, cultural discrimination, and pervasive violence.
Throughout the Peruvian Amazon, indigenous peoples have long faced centuries of missionization, unregulated streams of colonists, land-grabbing, decades of formal schooling in an alien tongue, pressures to conform to a foreign national culture, and more recently, explosive expressions of violent social conflict fueled by a booming underground coca economy. The disruptions accompanying the establishment of extractive economies, coupled with the Peruvian state-sanctioned civilizing project, have led to a devastating impoverishment of Amazonia's richly variegated social and ecological communities.
The most visited tourist destinations of Peru were built by
indigenous peoples (the
Quechua,
Aymara,
Moche, etc.), while
Amazonian peoples, such as the
Urarina,
Bora,
Matsés,
Ticuna,
Yagua,
Shipibo and the
Aguaruna, developed elaborate
shamanic systems of belief prior to the European Conquest of the
New World.
Macchu Picchu is considered one of the marvels of humanity, and it was constructed by the
Inca civilization. Even though Peru officially declares its multi-ethnic character and recognizes at least six–dozen languages—including
Quechua,
Aymara and
hegemonic Spanish—
discrimination and
language endangerment continue to challenge the indigenous peoples in Peru.
United States
Indigenous peoples in what is now the contiguous United States are commonly called "American Indians", or just "Indians" domestically, but are also often referred to as "
Native Americans". In Alaska, indigenous peoples, which include Native Americans,
Yupik and
Inupiat Eskimos, and
Aleuts, are referred to collectively as
Alaska Natives. Native Americans and Alaska Natives make up 2 percent of the population, with more than 6 million people identifying themselves as such, although only 1.8 million are registered tribal members. A minority of U.S. Native Americans live in zones called
Indian reservations. There are also many Southwestern U.S. tribes, such as the Yaqui and Apache, that have registered tribal communities in Northern Mexico and several bands of Blackfoot reside in southern Alberta. There is further Native American ancestry by various extraction existing across all social races that's mostly unaccounted for.
Native cultures in
Hawaii still thrive following annexation to the US.
Other parts of the Americas
Indigenous peoples make up the majority of the population in
Bolivia and
Peru, and are a significant element in most other former
Spanish colonies. Exceptions to this include
Costa Rica,
Cuba,
Puerto Rico,
Argentina,
Dominican Republic,
Chile, and
Uruguay. At least three of the native American languages (
Quechua in
Peru and
Bolivia,
Aymara also in
Bolivia, and
Guarani in
Paraguay) are recognized along with
Spanish as national languages.
Native American name controversy
The
Native American name controversy is an ongoing dispute over the acceptable ways to refer to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and to broad subsets thereof, such as those living in a specific country or sharing certain cultural attributes. Once-common terms like "Indian" remain in use, despite the introduction of terms such as "Native American" and "Amerindian" during the latter half of the 20th century.
Rise of Indigenous Movements
In recent years, there has been a rise of indigenous movements in the Americas. These are rights-driven groups that organize themselves in order to achieve self-determination and the preservation of culture for their peoples. Organizations like the
Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin and the Indian Council of South America are examples of movements that are breaking the barrier of borders in order to obtain rights for
Amazonian indigenous populations everywhere. Similar movements for indigenous rights can also be seen in Canada and the United States with movements like the International Indian Treaty Council. There has even been a recognition of indigenous movements on an international scale with the
United Nations adopting the
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Indigenous Peoples Of America'.
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