Encyclopedia
The term
Indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the inhabitants of the
Americas before the European discovery of the Americas in the late 15th century, as well as many present-day ethnic groups who identify themselves with those historical peoples.
According to current
scientific knowledge, no
humans evolved in
North America or
South America but instead arrived by
sea or by a land bridge that formerly connected North America with
Asia. Most of those indigenous peoples descend from peoples from
Siberia, who probably entered North America more than 16,000 years ago and spread and diversified into hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes.
While many of these indigenous peoples retained a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle until modern times, others lived in permanent villages and were primarily farmers, and in some regions they created large sedentary chiefdom polities, and even advanced state level societies with monumental
architecture and large-scale, organized
cities. Estimates of the total population of the Americas before contact vary enormously. Low estimates of 10 million compare to high estimates of 112 million with a lack of evidence giving a continued scholarly disagreement.
Smallpox,
typhus,
influenza,
diphtheria,
measles and other epidemics swept in after European contact, killing a large portion of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, causing one of the greatest calamities in human history. At least 93 waves of epidemic disease swept through Native populations between first contact and the early 20th century.
See also: Mississippian culture, Cahokia, Mesoamerica, Maya, Olmec, Zapotec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Aztec, Raramuri, Aymara, Inca, Urarina, indigenous people of Brazil.History
See also: Archaeology of the Americas, Models of migration to the New WorldThe Bering Strait Land Bridge Theory
Based on
anthropological, genetic, and linguistic evidence, scholars generally agree that most indigenous peoples of the Americas descend from people who probably
migrated from
Siberia across the
Bering Strait, 9,000-15,000 years ago. The exact epoch and route is still a matter of debate, and continual challenges are issued to this model. For more information, see
Models of migration to the New World and
Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact.
A recent study reports new DNA-based research that uniquely links the 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 found in any of the 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.
Migration waves
In spite of the lingering controversy about who were the first Americans,
anthropologists and archaeologists generally agree that most of the indigenous peoples who lived in the New World right before the European conquest descended from Siberian hunters, who entered North America about ten millennia ago, and then gradually spread to Central and South America.
Several genetic surveys have indicated clear affinities between present-day indigenous American populations and peoples of Siberia. According to Ilya Zakharov of
Moscow's Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, the Northern Native Americans are related to the Tuvans, a
Turkic group of people located in the
Tuva Republic at the southwestern edge of Siberia. The general consensus of such studies is that at least three separate migrations from Siberia to the Americas are highly likely to have occurred:
- The first wave came into a land populated by the large mammals of the late Pleistocene, including mammoths, horses, giant sloths, and woolly rhinoceroses. The Clovis culture would be a manifestation of that migration, and the Folsom culture, based on the hunting of bison, would have developed from it. This wave eventually spread over the entire hemisphere, as far south as Tierra del Fuego, and became the inhabitants of central to eastern North America and most if not all of Central and South America.
- The second migration brought the ancestors of the Na-Dene peoples. They lived in Alaska and western Canada, but some migrated as far south as the Pacific Northwestern U.S. and the American Southwest, and would be ancestral to the Dene, Apaches and Navajos.
- The third wave brought the ancestors of the Eskimos and the Aleuts. They may have come by sea over the Bering Strait, after the land bridge had disappeared.
- In recent years, molecular genetics studies have suggested as many as four distinct migrations from Asia. These studies also provide surprising evidence of smaller-scale, contemporaneous migrations from Europe, possibly by peoples who had adopted a lifestyle resembling that of the Inuit and Yupiks during the last ice age.
One result of these successive 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 life styles.
European colonization
The
European colonization of the Americas forever changed the lives and cultures of the peoples of the continent. From the
15th to
19th centuries, their populations were ravaged by the privations of displacement, by disease, and in many cases by warfare with European groups and enslavement by them. The first indigenous group encountered by Columbus were the 250,000 Arawaks of
Hispaniola. They were enslaved. The culture was extinct by 1650, and only 500 had survived by the year 1550, though the bloodlines continued through the modern populace. In Amazonia, indigenous societies weathered centuries of unforgiving colonial affronts .
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. Ironically, the horse had originally evolved in the Americas, but the last American horses, died out at the end of the last
ice age with other megafauna. The re-introduction of the horse had a profound impact on Native American and First Nations culture in the
Great Plains of North 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.
Europeans also brought diseases against which the indigenous peoples of the Americas had no immunity. Chicken pox and
measles, though common and rarely fatal among Europeans, often proved fatal to the indigenous people, and more dangerous diseases such as
smallpox were especially deadly to indigenous populations. It is difficult to estimate the total percentage of the indigenous population killed by these diseases. Epidemics often immediately followed European exploration, sometimes destroying entire villages. Some historians estimate that up to 80% of some indigenous populations may have died due to European diseases.
Culture
Though cultural features including language, garb, and customs vary enormously from one tribe to another, there are certain elements which are shared by many of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
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 is not 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 was not 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 number of instruments such as drums, flutes, sea snails shells , "rain" tubes, etc. No string instruments were used, though, only percussion and wind.
Art of the indigenous peoples of the Americas comprises a major category in the world art collection. Contributions include
pottery,
paintings,
jewelry,
weavings,
sculptures,
basketry, and carvings.
Agricultural endowment
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, particularly the advanced civilizations that lived in
Mesoamerica, i.e. southern
Mexico. Many of these
cultivars spread throughout the American continent and are presently common staples in diets worldwide. More than half of all crops grown worldwide were initially developed by indigenous peoples of the Americas. In many cases, the indigenous peoples developed entirely new species from existing wild ones, 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 their original
Nahuatl names in the
English and
Spanish lexicons.
The modern American holiday of
Thanksgiving is a national holiday of thanks featuring the bountiful produce provided by indigenous peoples to European immigrants. The holiday is celebrated by a family meal with dishes prepared exclusively of indigenous agricultural produce and the domesticated
turkey game bird.
A partial list of this agricultural endowment would include:
The triumvirate crop system known as the “three sisters”:
- Maize*
- Squash*
- Pinto bean
Other widely common staples now used globally:
- Tomato*
- Potato*
- Avocado*
- Cacahuate*
- Cacao* beans
- Vanilla
- Black raspberry
- Strawberry
- Pineapple
- Cassava*
- Peppers
- Allspice
...
Staples still used regionally:
- Nopales*
- Tunas*
- Jicama*
- Papaya*
- Guayaba*
- Huautli*
- Quinoa
- Cherimoya*
- Sapote*
- Mamey*
- Yerba Buena
- Mexican Oregano
- Lemon Verbena
Indigenous protein sources:
- Sunflower seeds
- Pecan
- Pinyones
- Turkey
- Spirulina
- Guinea pigs
- Chapulin*
- Fresh water/marine: Fish , shellfish
Ceremonial
entheogens:
- Tobacco*
- Tesguino*
- Octli*
- Peyote*
- Coca*
Non-food agricultural products:
- Rubber
- Chicle*
- Cotton
- Chinchona*
- Achiote*
Modern statistics on indigenous 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 is comprised by indigenous peoples, and of people with partly indigenous descent. The total percentage obtained by adding both of these categories is also given .
History and status by country
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. First Nations peoples make up approximately 3% of the Canadian population; Inuit, Métis and First Nations together make up 5%. The official term for First Nations people—that is, the term used by both the Indian Act, which regulates benefits received by members of First Nations, and the Indian Register, which defines who is a member of a First Nation—is
Indian.
United States
Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States are commonly called "American Indians" but more recently have been referred to as "
Native Americans". Native Americans make up 2% 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 US Native Americans live on
Indian reservations.
Mexico
The territory of modern-day
Mexico was home to numerous indigenous civilizations prior to the arrival of the European
conquistadors: The
Olmecs, who flourished from between 1200 BC to about 800 BC 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
YucatánIn 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 .
Mestizos quickly came to account for a majority of the colony's population; however, significant pockets of pure-blood
indígenas have survived to the present day.
With
mestizos numbering some 60% of the modern population, estimates for the numbers of unmixed indigenous peoples vary from a very modest 10% to a more liberal 30% 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 are practically absent from the northeast but, in the northwest and central borderlands, include the Tarahumara of
Chihuahua and the Yaquis and Seri of
Sonora.
While Mexicans are universally proud of their indigenous
heritage,
modern-day indigenous Mexicans are still the target of discrimination and outright racism. 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.
Belize
Mestizos number about 45% of the population; unmixed Maya make up another 10%.
Guatemala
The indigenous peoples of
Guatemala are of Maya stock.
Pure Maya account for some 45% of the population; although around 40% of the population speaks an indigenous language, those tongues enjoy no official status. Maya sources, however, place estimates at around 60% of the population.
Colombia
A small minority within Colombia's overwhelmingly
Mestizo and Afro-Colombian population, Colombia's indigenous peoples nonetheless encompass at least 85 distinct cultures and more than 700,000 people. A variety of collective rights for indigenous peoples are recognized in the 1991 Constitution.
Brazil
Argentina
See also
Demographics of ArgentinaArgentina's Native American population is about 403.000 . Indigenous nations include the Toba, Wichí, Mocoví, Pilagá, Chulupí, Diaguita-Calchaquí, Kolla,
Guaraní 
