Native American

**Native Americans** (also called **Aboriginal Americans**, **American Indians**, **Amerindians**, or **Indigenous peoples of the Americas**) are the indigenous peoples and their descendants, who were in the Americas before the Europeans arrived.

## Name

The people are sometimes called **Indians**, but that may be confusing, because it is the same word used for people from India. When Christopher Columbus explored the area, he did not know about the Americas. He was in the Caribbean but thought he was in the East Indies and so he called the people Indians. Today, some think that it is racism to use Indian for a Native American.

There are different Native American tribes, with many different languages. Some tribes were hunter-gatherers who moved from place to place. Others lived in one place and built cities and kingdoms. Many Native Americans died after the European settlers came to the Americas. One reason is that diseases came with the Europeans but were new to the Native Americans. There were also battles with the Europeans. Many native people were hurt, killed, or forced to leave their homes by settlers, who took their lands.

## Origins

The ancestors of Native Americans came to the Americas from Asia. Some of them may have come to the Americas 15,000 years ago, when Alaska was connected to Siberia by the Bering land bridge.

The earliest people in the Americas came from Siberia when there was an ice bridge across the Bering Strait. The cold but mainly grassy plain, called Beringia, was a land bridge that connected Siberia with Canada. It is believed that a few thousand people arrived in Beringia from eastern Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum and that they moved into the Americas sometime after 16,500 years before the present (BP). That would have occurred as the American glaciers blocking the way southward melted but before the land bridge was covered by the sea about 11,000 years BP.

Before the European colonization of the Americas and Russian expansion to the Russian Far East, Beringia was inhabited by the Yupik peoples on both sides of the straits. The culture remains in the region today, with others. In 2012, the governments of Russia and the United States announced a plan to formally establish "a transboundary area of shared Beringian heritage." Among other things, the agreement would establish close ties between the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve and the Cape Krusenstern National Monument in the United States, and Beringia National Park in Russia. Native Americans were divided into many small nations that are called called First Nations in Canada and tribes in the United States.

## Culture

The Native American tribes have their own cultures, which can be grouped together by region. For example, the tribes living in Mesoamerica have similar cultures.

### Food

Native Americans ate various food depending on where they lived. Native Americans from Mesoamerica introduced vanilla, avocados and chocolate to the world.

### Religion

Before Europeans came, the Native Americans practiced many different religions. Each tribe had its own different beliefs. Many Native Americans now practice Christianity, a religion that was brought to the Americas by Europeans. Others, meanwhile, still practice their own religions.

### Languages

Native Americans speak over 1000 different languages. Some of these languages had writing systems before Europeans came. Many of these languages are endangered because more people speak European languages and do not teach their children Native American languages.

### Music

Native Americans make musical instruments using the things around them.

### Art

Native Americans made many different kinds of art, like beadwork, which is making decorative work from beads.

### North America

There are now more than three million Native Americans in Canada and the United States combined. About 51 million more Native Americans live in Latin America. Many Native Americans still speak native languages and have their own cultural practices, and others have adopted parts of American culture. Many Native Americans still face problems with racism.

#### United States

According to the 2010 United States Census, 0.9% of Americans say that they are Native American, 2.9 million people, and 0.8% of Americans say they are both Native American and something else.  They are not evenly spread out through the United States. About a third of the people in Alaska are Native Alaskan. and about a sixth of the people in Oklahoma are Native American.

In the United States, most Native Americans live in cities. About 28% of Native Americans live on Indian reservations. Many Native Americans are poor, and 24% are extremely poor. The history of violence against Native Americans still persists in higher rates of violence against Native Americans than whites.

#### Mexico

Many Mexicans are of Native American or mestizo ancestry. Mexico has the largest and most diverse Native American population in Latin America.

#### Canada

In the 2016 census, more than 1.67 million people in Canada identified as Indigenous, making them 4.9 percent of Canada’s population.

#### Guatemala

About 40% of the people of Guatemala identify as Native American. Many indigenous groups in the country are descendants of the Maya. Many Native Americans in Guatemala are poor. Many of them have left the country to find better jobs elsewhere.

#### Bolivia

Most people in Bolivia belong to indigenous groups. Many of them are Aymara and Quechua.

#### Peru

Peru has a large indigenous population, around 80% of the country's population identifying as indigenous or mestizo.

## Indigenous activism

In the later half of the 20th century, many Native Americans protested the unfair treatment that they experienced from the societies in which they lived. Some Native Americans have become famous in politics. For example, an Aymara man. Evo Morales was elected as president of Bolivia in 2005.

## Related pages

- First Nations
- Plains Indians
- Native Americans in the United States

## Infobox (ethnic group)

- **group**: Native Americans
- **image**: File:Edward S. Curtis Collection People 013.jpg
- **image caption**: A picture of a man from the Gros Ventre tribe
- **total**: 70 million +
- **languages**: Indigenous languages of the Americas, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, Danish, French, Russian