Indigenous peoples of the Americas: Difference between revisions

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

Current distribution of Indigenous peoples of the Americas
Approximately 70 million
Mexico	11.8 – 23.2 million[1][2]
United States	9.7 million[3]
Guatemala	6.4 million[4]
Peru	14.9 million[5]
Bolivia	4.1 million[6]
Chile	2.1 million[7]
Colombia	1.9 million[8]
Canada	1.8 million[9]
Brazil	1.7 million[10]
Ecuador	1.3 million[11]
Argentina	955,032[12]
Venezuela	724,592[13]
Honduras	601,019[14]
Nicaragua	443,847[15]
Panama	417,559[16]
Paraguay	117,150[17]
Costa Rica	104,143[18]
Guyana	78,492[19]
Uruguay	76,452[20]
Greenland	50,189[21]
Belize	36,507[22]
Suriname	20,344[23]
Puerto Rico	19,839[24]
French Guiana	~19,000[25]
Denmark	17,067[26]
El Salvador	13,310[27]
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	3,280[28]
Netherlands	3,000 (estimate, likely more)[29]
Dominica	2,576[30]
Russia	2,054[31]
Trinidad and Tobago	1,394[32]
Saint Lucia	951[33]
Antigua and Barbuda	327[34]
Grenada	162[35]
Barbados	100[36]
Mostly Christianity (Catholic and Protestant), along with various Indigenous American religions
Mestizos, Métis, Zambos, Pardos, and Indigenous Siberian peoples

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.^[37]

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.^[38] 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.

Many parts of the Americas are still populated by Indigenous peoples; some countries have sizeable populations, especially Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and the United States. At least a thousand different Indigenous languages are spoken in the Americas, where there are also 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States alone. Several of these languages are recognized as official by several governments such as those in Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, and Greenland. Some, such as Quechua, Arawak, Aymara, Guaraní, Mayan, and Nahuatl, count their speakers in the millions. Whether contemporary Indigenous people live in rural communities or urban ones, many also maintain additional aspects of their cultural practices to varying degrees, including religion, social organization, and subsistence practices. Like most cultures, over time, cultures specific to many Indigenous peoples have also evolved, preserving traditional customs but also adjusting to meet modern needs. Some Indigenous peoples still live in relative isolation from Western culture and a few are still counted as uncontacted peoples.^[39] Indigenous peoples from the Americas have also formed diaspora communities outside the Western Hemisphere, namely in former colonial centers in Europe. A notable example is the sizable Greenlandic Inuit community in Denmark.^[40] In the 20th and 21st centuries, Indigenous peoples from Suriname and French Guiana migrated to the Netherlands and France, respectively.^[41][29]

Terminology[edit]

Application of the term “Indian” originated with Christopher Columbus, who, in his search for India, thought that he had arrived in the East Indies.^{[42][43][44][45][46][47]}

The islands came to be known as the “West Indies“, a name that is still used to describe the islands. This led to the blanket term “Indies” and “Indians” (Spanish: indios; Portuguese: índios; French: indiens; Dutch: indianen) for the Indigenous inhabitants, which implied some kind of ethnic or cultural unity among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. This unifying concept, codified in law, religion, and politics, was not originally accepted by the myriad groups of Indigenous peoples themselves but has since been embraced or tolerated by many over the last two centuries.^[48] Even though the term “Indian” generally does not include the culturally and linguistically distinct Indigenous peoples of the Arctic regions of the Americas, including the Aleuts, Inuit, or Yupik peoples, who entered the continent as a second, more recent wave of migration several thousand years later and have much more recent genetic and cultural commonalities with the Indigenous peoples of Siberia—these groups are nonetheless considered “Indigenous peoples of the Americas”.^[49]

The term Amerindian, a portmanteau of “American Indian”, was coined in 1902 by the American Anthropological Association. It has…