Native Americans (also Indians, American Indians, First Nations, Alaskan Natives, Red Indians, or Indigenous Peoples of America) refers to the indigenous inhabitants of Americas prior to the European colonization, and their modern descendants. This term comprises a large number of distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of them still enduring as political communities.

Depending on the context, the terms "Indian" or "Native American" may or may not include the "Eskimos" (Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples), which are very distinctive in culture and genetics from the other groups. The terms may also be construed to include or exclude the Canadian Métis.

Native Americans officially make up the majority of the population in Bolivia, Peru, and Guatemala and are a significant element in most other former Spanish colonies, with the exception of Costa Rica, Cuba, Argentina, Dominican Republic and Uruguay. At least three of the Amerindian languages (Quechua in Peru and Bolivia, Aymara also in Bolivia, and Guarani in Paraguay) are recognized as national languages alongside Spanish.

 

Early History

See also: Archeology of the Americas

Based on anthropological and genetic evidence, scientists generally agree that most Native Americans descend from people who have migrated from Siberia across the Bering Strait, at least 10,000 years ago.

However, the precise epoch and route is still a matter of controversy. Until recently there was a consensus that the migrants crossed the strait around 10,000 BC via the Bering Land Bridge which existed during the last Ice Age (24,000 to 9,000 BC); and that they followed an inland route through Alaska and Canada that had just been freed of its ice cover. There are, however, a number of difficulties in this theory — in particular, growing evidence of human presence in Brazil and Chile by 9,500 BC or earlier [1] (http://www.andaman.org/book/chapter53/luzia/luzia.htm). Thus other possibilities, not necessarily exclusive, have been suggested:

• The migrants may have crossed the land bridge several millenia earlier, and followed a coastal route thus avoiding the ice-covered interior.
• They may have been seafaring people that moved along the coast.
• The crossing of the Bering Land Bridge may have occurred during the previous Ice Age, around 35,000 BC.

A more radical alternative is that the Siberians were preceded by migrants from Oceania, who arrived either by sailing across the Pacific Ocean or by following the land route through Beringia at a much earlier date. Proponents of this theory claim that the oldest human remains in South America and in Baja California show distinctive non-Siberian traits, resembling those of Australian Aborigines or the Negritos of the Andaman Islands. These hypothetical American Aborigines would have been displaced by the Siberian migrants, and may have been ancestral to the distinctive Native Americans of the Tierra del Fuego, which are nearly extinct.

Other theories have been advanced as to the origin of Native Americans:

• Several amateur historians have suggested that they are descendants of Europeans or Africans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in prehistory. For instance, some proponents claim to see a resemblance between Olmec physique and African physique. The journalist Thor Heyerdahl demonstrated the possibility of this by sailing from Africa to America on a replica of an Ancient Egyptian reed boat.
• Most Native American religions teach that humans were created in America at the beginning of time.
• According to Mormon doctrine, most Native Americans are descendants of Lehi and the Nephites, Israelites who came to the Americas c. 590 B.C.
• In the 19th century and early 20th century, proponents of the existence of lost continents such as Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria would use them to explain how humans could have reached the Americas.

Although there are some experts actively researching these hypotheses, they are not taken seriously by mainstream anthropologists and archaeologists, who consider the genetic, linguistic, and cultural evidence for a Siberian origin overwhelming.

According to that evidence, 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 wooly 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 continent as far south as Tierra del Fuego.

The second migration brought the ancestors of the Na-Dene peoples. The Na-Dene peoples generally lived in Alaska and western Canada, but some migrated as far south as the Pacific Northwestern US and the American Southwest, and would be ancestral to the 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. Most surprisingly, those studies provide evidence of smaller-scale, contemporaneous human migration from Europe, possibly by European peoples who had adopted a lifestyle resembling that of Inuits and Yupiks during the last ice age.

While many Native American groups retained a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle down to the time of European invasion, in some regions, specifically in the Mississippi River valley of the United States, in Mexico, Central America, the Andes of South America, they built advanced civilizations with monumental architecture and large-scale organizaton into cities and states.

See also: Mississippian civilization, Cahokia, Mesoamerica, Maya, Olmec, Zapotec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Aztec, Aymara, Inca, indigenous people of Brazil.

European colonization of the Americas

The Arrival of Europeans

The European colonization of the Americas forever changed the lives and cultures of the Native Americans. In the 15th to 19th centuries, their populations were decimated, by the privations of displacement, by disease, and in many cases by warfare with European groups and enslavement by them. The first Native American group encountered by Columbus, the 250,000 Arawaks of Haiti, were violently enslaved. Only 500 survived by the year 1550, and the group was totally extinct before 1650. Over the next 400 years, if the contacts between the two cultures rarely amounted to outright genocide, they would typically be disastrous for the Native Americans.

In the 15th century Spaniards and other Europeans brought horses to the Americas. Some of these animals escaped their owners 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. The re-introduction of the horse, however, had a profound impact on Native American cultures in the Great Plains of North America. This new mode of travel made it possible for some tribes to greatly expand their territories, exchange goods with neighboring tribes and to more easily capture game.

Europeans also brought diseases against which the Native Americans had no immunity. Sometimes they did this intentionally, but often it was unintentional. Ailments such as chicken pox and measles, though common and rarely fatal among Europeans, often proved fatal to Native Americans. More deadly diseases such as smallpox were especially deadly to Native American populations. It is difficult to estimate the percentage of the total Native American population killed by these diseases, since waves of disease oftentimes preceded White scouts and often destroyed entire villages. Some historians have argued that up to 80% of some Indian populations may have died due to European-derived diseases. (See Jeffrey Amherst for an example of germ warfare)