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.

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. 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. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Indigenous peoples from Suriname and French Guiana migrated to the Netherlands and France, respectively.