The indigenous peoples of North America are the tribes and nations whose ancestors were already on the continent when European explorers and colonizers arrived.

The largest group are American Indians who arrived before 10,000 BC, inhabited most of the continent, and are closely related to the indigenous cultures of South America. In the US they are now usually called Native Americans and in Canada First Nations. Groups that arrived later settled in less hospitable northern areas, the Eskimo or Inuit in Alaska, Northern Canada and Greenland and the Aleuts in the Aleutian Islands. Further, there are the Métis people of Canada and the northern US who have a distinct culture of their own blending indigenous and European (French and Scottish) elements.

Native Hawaiians are from a very different culture and history and are not included in this guide. See Hawaii#History.

Understand

File:Nordamerikanische Kulturareale en.png

Cultural areas of North America at time of Spanish contact

There have been hundreds of indigenous nations and tribes. Many exist today, though often greatly reduced in numbers and territory, while others were wiped out by Europeans (in particular the Spanish, British, French), or the modern states which succeeded them (the U.S., Mexico, Canada, etc.), either from diseases brought from the Old World, by military conquest or for other reasons.

Anthropologists who study indigenous cultures tend to group them either according the similarities of their languages or by their geographic location. Language is useful in determining which groups are related to each other and how they migrated over time. For example, the relationships within the Uto-Aztecan language family suggest that the founders of the Aztec Empire were related to groups from thousands of kilometres to the north in the present-day United States, like the Utes.

Geography is more useful is imagining how people go about their day to day lives: peoples living in a similar climate tend to have similar lifestyles based on harvesting the same natural resources. Here are some main cultural regions, correlated with guides on Wikivoyage:

• Arctic — the entire Arctic Ocean coast of Canada and Alaska, plus parts of Alaska's Pacific cost and of Greenland.
• Subarctic — the entire Boreal forest region
• Northwest Coast — the Pacific coast from the Alaska Panhandle to Northern California
• Plateau — Cariboo, Thompson-Okanagan, Kootenays, North Cascades (part), Northeast Washington, Columbia River Plateau, Palouse (Washington), Idaho (majority).
• California — part of Baja California (state) and most of the regions of the U.S. sate of California
• Great Basin — Nevada, Utah, Southwestern Idaho.
• Southwestern — In the entire Southwestern United States (Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah) and all the states of northern Mexico.
• Great Plains — Alberta Rockies, Central Alberta, Southern Alberta, Central Saskatchewan, Southern Saskatchewan, Central Manitoba, Prairie Mountain, Montana, Wyoming, Front Range, Eastern Plains (Colorado), the entire Great Plains region (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma), Southern Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri.
• Northeastern — Ontario (all or part of every region), Outaouais, Southwestern Quebec, Central Quebec, Southeastern Quebec, all of the Maritime Provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island), all of New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont), all of the Mid-Atlantic (Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C.)
• Southeastern — Basically synonymous with the Southern United States as used on Wikivoyage (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia) plus Florida.
• Mesoamerican — All of the regions of Mexico except the far north and parts of Central America
• Caribbean — on the Caribbean islands

Peoples can and did move across these regional boundaries, often moving seasonally to access different resources at different times of the year, for example people from the Subarctic region spending part of the year on the Great Plains to hunt bison. Also there was extensive trade; the high-grade flint from the Niagara region has been found at pre-Columbian Hopi and Navaho sites in the U.S. Southwest, and obsidian from Yellowstone, Wyoming was traded as far away as the U.S. Gulf Coast a thousand years before Columbus.

The Mesoamericans, Southwestern, Southeastern, and Northeastern cultures were farmers, and these groups had large, complex societies with permanent settlements, specialized artisans and officials, and social hierarchy. The majority of people living in North America at the time of contact lived in these regions. The Mesoamerican civilizations (Mayans, Aztecs, Toltecs, Olmecs, etc.) were the earliest farmers, domesticating the "Three Sisters" of maize (corn), squash, and beans. Mesoamericans also had the most urbanized societies, with a network of villages, towns, and even walled cities featuring large temples and palaces, and were the only ones in the New World to have writing. The Southwestern peoples eventually developed strains of the Three Sisters that could survive their their harsh, desert climate and build abode-walled villages, or in Spanish pueblos, and are often known as puebloans. The Southeastern peoples adopted the Three Sisters from the Mesoamericans and built large earth mounds and had relatively a few relatively large towns and cities, as well as many smaller villages. Northeastern cultures lived in small, fenced villages and practised a mixed lifestyle that combined shifting agriculture (the Three Sisters, as well as wild rice), with hunting and gathering.

Most of the rest continent was populated by hunter-gatherers. They were dependent on the North American wildlife for survival. They typically lived in portable dwellings (domed wigwams or hogans, conical teepees) so they could follow their principle game animals: bison on the plains, deer and moose in the subarctic, and so on. Their population densities were very low, especially in Subarctic. An exception to this were peoples of the North West Coast who despite not practising agriculture where able to live in hard-walled houses in relatively larger population densities due to the abundance of seafood available in their region.

Note that the island of Newfoudland, is excluded from this list since it's original indigenous population, the Beothuk, are extinct, but are believed to have followed a subarctic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Newfoundland was later re-settled by Mi'kmaq people from Nova Scotia.

Destinations

Natives live all over North America and some native artifacts can be found in many museums all over the continent.

Artifacts have been found at a number of archeological sites, some dating back many thousands of years. The sites themselves are closed to visitors when excavations are under way, and visiting them at other times is likely to be a bad idea — not much to see and digging on your own would be a crime. However, nearby museums are often worth a visit and there may be opportunities for volunteer work on some sites.

Before 3000 BCE

• 1 Sun River (Tanana River Valley, Interior Alaska). This site is from about 9,500 BCE and has the oldest human remains yet found in the Arctic. Its people are thought to have been descended from Ancient Beringians, the first group to cross the Bering Strait land bridge several thousand years earlier; DNA evidence suggests the Beringians were not closely related to later groups.  
• 2 On Your Knees Cave (Prince of Wales Island, Southern Alaska). Has artifacts from about 8,000 BCE.  
• 3 Triquet Island (off the BC coast). Site of a village that appears to have been a refuge from the last ice age, 12,000 BCE or earlier.  

A Clovis point

• 4 Clovis Culture (near Clovis (New Mexico)). A site from around 11,000 BCE; many tools and one grave have been found at Blackwater Draw near Clovis. The people were stone age hunters and produced distinctive flint work called Clovis points. Clovis is the "type site" for the culture, first excavated around 1920, but there are many other sites in various parts of the US, Mexico, Central America and even Venezuela.
  DNA evidence shows a close relation between the Clovis people and later Native Americans. The "Clovis First" hypothesis — that the Clovis people were descended from the first migrants across the Bering land bridge and were the ancestors of all later groups — was held by many archeologists in the 20th century. That notion is considered oversimplified now, mainly because excavations from Alaska to Chile have turned up evidence of pre-Clovis humans. However the Clovis people remain important in any version of the history; theirs is by far the oldest culture in the Americas for which there is undisputed evidence from multiple sites.  
• 5 Lamoka Site, New York (near Tyrone). Dating to around 3500 BCE, the Lamoka Site provides the first clear evidence of a hunter-gatherer culture in the northeastern United States. Co-ordinates used for the map are for the town and are approximate; the actual site is protected and publishing its exact location would be illegal. (updated Feb 2019)
• 6 Áísínai’pi National Historic Site of Canada (Writing-on-Stone, Glyphs) (about 100 kilometres southeast of Lethbridge, Alberta), ☏ +1 403-647-2364. Home to Siksika (Blackfoot) glyphs that date back as much as 9,000 years.  
• 7 Majorville Medicine Wheel ("Canada's Stonehenge") (Near Bassano in southern Alberta). A sacred Blackfoot site dating back to about 3200 BCE.  

• 8 Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (Estipah-skikikini-kots) (near Fort Macleod, Alberta), ☏ +1 403-553-2731. Blackfoot hunters would drive a whole herd over a cliff; the site was used for at least 5,500 years. This buffalo jump is a UNESCO World Heritage site and has a Museum of Blackfoot Culture.  

3000 BCE to contact

• 1 Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Illinois. A UNESCO World Heritage Site with a fine museum. At its peak, around 1200 CE, a city of over 15,000.  
• 2 Effigy Mounds National Monument, Iowa. Effigy mounds shaped like bears and birds. Built by several tribes between about 600 and 1250 CE.  

• 3 Moundsville, West Virginia. Burial mounds from about 200 BCE.  
• 4 Pipestone National Monument (Pipestone, Minnesota). Site of quarries for stone used in pipes and ornaments; these are still carved for the tourist trade.  
• 5 Great Serpent Mound. The largest earthworks serpent in the world. (updated Nov 2018)
• 6 Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village (Mitchell Site, Boehnen Museum, Thomsen Center Archeodome), Mitchell, ☏ +1 605 996-5473. The Boehnen Museum offers exhibits related to the thousand year old village. Included in the museum is a reconstructed lodge, next door the Thomsen Center Archeodome covers the on-going archeological dig and provides a teaching and research facility as well as some hands on activities upstairs. 

• 7 Aztec Ruins National Monument (near Aztec, New Mexico).  
• 8 Bandelier National Monument (near Los Alamos, New Mexico).  
• 9 Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, Southwestern Colorado. Contains more than 6,000 archaeological sites, representing Ancestral Puebloan and other Native American cultures.  
• 10 Copper Canyon (In the Mexican state of Chihuahua).  
• 11 Hovenweep National Monument (near Cortez, Colorado).  
• 12 Mesa Verde National Park (near Cortez, Colorado). 
• 13 Navajo Nation (northeastern Arizona and smaller portions of other nearby states). (updated Sep 2018)

• 14 Canyon de Chelly National Monument. (updated Sep 2018)
• 15 Chaco Culture National Historical Park. (updated Sep 2018)
• 16 Four Corners Monument and Tribal Park (where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona meet). (updated Sep 2018)
• 17 Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. While there are the remnants of Native American dwellings in this Navajo Tribal Park, it is best-known for its rock formations and film-making history. (updated Sep 2018)

• 18 Yucca House National Monument (near Cortez, Colorado).  
• 19 Pecos National Historical Park (near Pecos, New Mexico). (updated Oct 2017)

• 20 Sermermiut (near Ilulissat). 4,000-year-old settlement. Archeological excavations have shown the site being inhabited by the Saqqaq, Early Dorset and Thule cultures. (updated Oct 2018)
• 21 Mantle Site, Wendat (Huron) Ancestral Village (Jean-Baptiste Lainé). Largest site associated with the Huron (Wendat) people yet found, discovered 2012. (updated Feb 2020)
• 22 Turtle Mound (south of New Smyrna Beach). A small hill made of shells, large by Florida standards, that was built by Native Americans. It may have been as high as 75 ft (23 m) before mining reduced its height by one-third. (updated Jul 2020)

Post-contact historic sites

• 1 Little Bighorn Battlefield (Custer's last stand) (near Crow Agency, Montana). Site of a major Indian victory over US cavalry in 1876.  
• 2 Chief Crazy Horse Memorial. Under construction in South Dakota. Crazy Horse was one of the leaders at Little Bighorn.  
• 3 Wounded Knee. Site of a massacre of over 150 Indians, mainly Sioux, by US Cavalry in 1890. Also of an armed standoff between the American Indian Movement and various law enforcement agencies in 1973.  
• 4 Standing Rock. Center of controversy in 2016 as local Indians tried to block construction of a pipeline that threatened their water supply.  
• 5 Whitman Mission (near Walla Walla, Washington). A stop on the Oregon Trail, in the territory of the Cayuse tribe. The missionaries were blamed for a measles outbreak that killed about half the tribe; some whites were massacred and others taken hostage. This resulted in a war, which of course the Indians lost. (updated Jul 2017)
• 6 Batoche National Historic Site, Rosthern, pc.infolhnbatoche-batochenhsinfo.pc@canada.ca. The site of the historic Battle of Batoche during the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, Métis versus the Canadian government's Northwest Mounted Police. The sites include a NWMP encampment, a church and rectory complex, and a farm home. (updated Jul 2019)

Museums

• 1 Anasazi Heritage Center (near Cortez, Colorado). (updated Feb 2020)

• 2 Royal Alberta Museum.  
• 3 Royal British Columbia Museum.  
• 4 Blackfoot Crossing. This is the location of a prehistoric site ("earth-lodge village"), a modern historic site (Treaty 7 signing site and grave of Poundmaker), and a museum and interpretive centre.  
• 5 National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C./National Mall, toll-free: +1 866 400-6624. 10AM-5:30PM daily. This museum displays the cultural traditions of the Native peoples of North, Central, and South America. It focuses on 20th century and present day culture much more than pre-Columbian and colonial periods. The exhibits can be fascinating, but are not as grandiose as those of other Smithsonian museums in DC. Perhaps the most important attraction is the gorgeous building itself, designed by famous Native Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal of Blackfoot descent, echoing the ancient stone formations of the American Southwest, and surrounded by manifestations both metaphorical and literal of natural North American landscapes.  
• 6 Ziibiwing Center of Anishnabe Culture & Lifeways, Mount Pleasant (Michigan), ☏ +1 989-775-4750. (updated Feb 2020)
• 7 Fort Edmonton Park, Edmonton/South, ☏ +1 780-496-8787. A new "Indigenous Peoples Experience" is scheduled to open in May of 2021. (updated Sep 2018)
• 8 Glenbow Museum, Calgary/City Centre, ☏ +1 403-268-4100. Western Canada's largest museum, with over 93,000 ft² (8,600 m²) of exhibition space on three floors. "Indigenous Cultures" is one of the largest permanent exhibits. (updated Oct 2018)
• 9 Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum, Banff, ☏ +1 403-762-2388, buffalonations@telus.net. Housed in a reproduction of a fur trading post, this museum focuses on the history of the First Nations in the Banff area. (updated Feb 2020)
• 10 Métis Crossing, Kalyna Country, ☏ +1 (780) 656-2229, metiscrossing@metis.org. A Métis Nation-owned-and-operated historic site, campground, and rental venue. (updated Jan 2020)
• 11 Tatanka: Story of the Bison, Deadwood, ☏ +1 605 584-5678, tatankadebp@rapidnet.com. Tatanka explores the history of the North American buffalo, which at one time had a population in excess of 30 million, but by the close of the 19th century the bison population was estimated at only 1,000. (updated Feb 2020)
• 12 Center for Western Studies, Sioux Falls, ☏ +1 605-274-4007. More than 200 collections dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history and cultures of the Northern Plains. (updated Feb 2020)
• 13 Wanuskewin Heritage Park, Saskatoon, ☏ +1 306-931-6767. Wanuskewin is an international visitor site to learn about 6,000 years of First Nations culture. Also has a gift shop and restaurant. (updated Jun 2016)
• 14 Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, Yellowknife, ☏ +1 867 873-7551. The territorial museum and archives of the Northwest Territories. (updated Feb 2020)
• 15 Museo Indígena (Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas), Mexico City. Mexico's first museum dedicated to living indigenous cultures (as opposed to archaeological relics). 

Buy

Northwest Coast Art found far from its home region at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau (near Ottawa).

See also: Art and antiques shopping

Various native handicrafts are often sold in tourist areas of some cities, for example:

• Northwest coast Indian art in Vancouver or Seattle
• Inuit art in Ottawa and Montreal (imported from Nunavut)
• Southwestern Indian items including fine silver and turquoise work in Santa Fe.

Native handicrafts are also sold on or near reserves; for example, the Navajo Nation has fine weavings and pottery.

Itineraries

• Lewis and Clark Trail, route of a US government expedition to what is now Oregon, 1804-1806
• Trail of Tears, route of a forced migration of Cherokee and others in which several thousand died
• The Mohawk Trail, a scenic route in Massachusetts
• Oregon Trail, a route of widespread settler colonization westward which had a severe impact on native communities on the trail

See also

• Early United States history
• Old West
• American Civil War
• New Mexico Pueblos
• Ohio prehistoric sites
• Indigenous cultures of South America