Who are the REAL Native Americans Indians? Exploring the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

one thing that's really been confusing for a lot of people for a really long time is the fact that Native Americans are historically and sometimes even in the modern day referred to as Indians many people still do this and even on the US Census natives are described as American Indians however clearly the natives of the American continents have very little if anything to do with the inhabitants of the modern day country of India the confusion arose when Christopher Columbus first sailed to America in 4 1992 mistakenly thinking he was headed for the South Asian country and named the inhabitants Indios meaning Indian in Spanish I know this might be obvious to a lot of people but many people outside of the Americas don't know this I personally like to use the term emmer indian when referring to Native Americans as a sort of combination of American Indian however there are many different names for these people depending on what region you're in the American continents were not populated in one Fell Swoop as you might have been led to believe but instead migrants arrived in waves of immigration starting with the Paleo amerindians whose descendant spread out over the vast entirety of the continents with the last wave probably being the Inuit people arriving in the far Northern fringes of North America over the last tens of thousands of years the various waves of immigration to the Americas mixed together creating their own gene pool and a distinct racial group greatly varying from Modern Northeast Asians although they are by no means all the same today we're going to be looking at some of the various Native American groups that have populated the various region of the continents of North and South America and their similarities and differences regarding phenotype language and culture there are of course thousands of different Native American tribes and ethnicities so obviously we won't have time to look at all of them but we'll go over some of the groups that I think are most noteworthy let's go ahead and start from the north and Meander our way South the Inuits aluit and other Northern Arctic peoples sometimes referred to collectively as Eskimos are the newest group to have migrated to the Americas having crossed over from Siberia about four to 5,000 years ago as such they are the most closely related of any native American group the original Northeast Asian gene pool that all amerindians originated from for this reason they are arguably the closest in appearance to Modern East Asians with the overwhelming majority of Inuits having the phenotype of a flatter face and the epicanthic eye fold of East Asians that gives their eyes their unique look they also generally but not always have a lighter skin tone than other Native Americans although they still have very dark hair and eyes today the innu are divided into many subgroups and don't have their own countries being relegated to the US state of Alaska the Northern Territories of Canada such as none of it and the territory of Greenland which actually still belongs to the country of Denmark as an overseas possession although the island has has gained a large increase in sovereignty in the recent past keep in mind this region along the coast of the Arctic Ocean is one of the places in the Americas where full-blooded ammer Indians still make up a majority of the population although the culture in Greenland is heavily europeanized with a very large proportion of greenlandic Inuits having at least some European admixture this was also the site of the first European Landing in the Americas with the north Vikings Landing in Greenland sometime around the year 900 beating Columbus by nearly 600 years Greenland's climate was far more habitable back then and the colony managed to survive until the early 1400s coincidentally only a century before Columbus was to first land in the Bahamas because of changing climate the north greenlanders either perished or were assimilated into the advancing innu tribes there are hundreds of different Amar Indian tribes located in the areas of Canada and the United States per official US Census reports full-blooded Native Americans make up less than 1% of the population at 0.9% keep in mind this number is far higher in some places than others but that's a pretty small percentage when including those of at least half native ancestry this number Rises to about 1.5% but this estimate doesn't include Americans of myso origin who probably have 30 to 50% native DNA some of the larger Native American groups groups in the continental US would include the Cherokee Sue and Chipawa Native Americans in the United States actually have one of the highest poverty levels highest suicide rates and lowest birth rates of any race in the country however increasing levels of immigration of Mexicans and other Latin Americans of Amar Indian descent keep the population steady and growing the Navajo today are the second largest group of Native Americans living in the United States with a population of around 300,000 people the majority still living on their traditional tribal land located in the middle of an intersection of four US states that being Utah Colorado New Mexico and Arizona they are one of the few Native American tribes that still inhabit a contiguous region and still largely speak their original language interestingly the Navajo were a huge assistance for the Americans during World War II where they worked as Code Talkers in the Pacific meaning that the Japanese spies intercepting American radio signals were unable to understand and interpret their strange language the likes of which they had never heard of they would even create their own nicknames for certain words that had no translation in the Navajo language now the situation in Latin America is much different than in Northern America race mixing and misation were far more common in Spanish and Portuguese America than in British America and for this reason many people with Emer Indian descent are mixed with Europeans and this racial group is known known as mysos the mystios are one of the largest racial groups in Latin America and can have such a huge range in appearance and culture that I'm reserving an entirely new video on the subject because they're quite an interesting group the amerindian inhabitants of Mexico Central America the Caribbean and the northern edge of South America share a common gene pool having similar characteristics as well as a tentative linguistic connection and are sometimes referred to as mesoamericans the two largest Amar Indian groups in Mainland Middle America would be the Aztecs also known as the Nawa people and the Mayans who are actually still around in large numbers believe it or not with the Aztecs being the largest indigenous group in Mexico today and the Mayans making up the majority of a couple of Mexican states as well as making up nearly 40% of the population of Guatemala the line between Northern Amar Indians and the Miso Americans is fairly debatable but is roughly contiguous with the US Mexican border give or take a few hundred miles the group of Emer Indians that was most heavily impacted by European Discovery and immigration was the carobs Tano and AOW walks of the Caribbean the Spanish occupation in Cuba Hispanola and Puerto Rico was particularly brutal to the natives living there with virtually the entire native populations of these regions either wiped out or absorbed into the emerging mixed RIS populations and these nations the Spanish received a particularly Fierce opposition to their colonial Endeavors in the Caribbean and as such the Spaniards were fairly merciless in dealing with Tano rebellions which is why there are no longer any full blooded Tano living in the area today because of the vast differences in climate between North and South America with South America not only having the vast Amazon rainforest but a variety of different climate regions including actual deserts as well the native amerindians of South America are far more isolated diverse and Divergent from each other the natives in areas like Brazil Colombia and Venezuela make up only a fraction of their populations at around 1 to 2% for each and even the largest of the Native ethnic groups only number maybe a 100,000 at the most the countries of the Pacific coast paint an entirely different picture with these countries actually having the largest amerindian concentrations in all of the Americas with Peru at 30 to 40% unmixed Native American and neighboring Bolivia possibly even higher at 50 to 60% making it the the sole remaining country in the entire world that still has a Native American racial majority the largest Native American ethnicity in South America and all of the Americas for that matter would have to be the ketua people of Peru and Bolivia at around 10 million people still around today they are essentially the successors of the famous Inca Empire the last of the major pre-colombian Empires to fall to European powers the ketua are notable for their unique style of dress and the fact that they were some of the only native tribes in all of the Americas to have domesticated and hered livestock that being the alaca for technological advancement before the arrival of the Europeans their empire was by far the largest and most impressive in all of precolonial America with the late Inca empire being larger than the modern-day country of Mexico in size stretching from Ecuador to Chile and having a population of 10 million people in the 1500s for comparison the United States didn't reach a population of 10 million until the 1820s over 300 years later however if You' watched one of my older videos you know that the group of Amar Indians that I think is the most interesting would have to be the yagan or fuan people on the very southern tip of South America on the island of chier del Fuego the closest landmass on Earth to the Frozen nightmare known as Antarctica the yagan are some of the the weirdest genetic outliers of any population on Earth being the only people group that could survive in the 40° fahit Waters around the island with any other human on the planet being dead from hypothermia in less than 20 minutes in those conditions they truly had to adapt to survive to their harsh climate giving proof that humans have the will to survive almost anywhere on Earth not only that but when first discovered by Europeans the yagan weree little to no clothing even while hunting out in the open unfortunately due to outbreaks and food shortages the yagan population was utterly devastated after European contact with there probably being very few if any full-blooded fian tribes left today in conclusion the Native Americans are a very diverse and fascinating group of human beings with so many thousands of groups someone could dedicate an entire channel to talking about them and would never run out of content to cover the vast majority of Native American groups and languages have yet to be properly researched or categorized so in a way there's still a whole new world of unexplored territory for demographers linguists and anthropologists to discover if they're up for it be sure to share this video with any friends of yours that are Native American or are curious as to who they are and let me know your thoughts on the Native American people down in the comments below and as always this has been Mason thanks for watching everyone and I'll see you next time

Channel: Masaman

Views: 820,687

Keywords: masaman, Indian, Indian American, Native American, Native American Indian, American Indian, Amerindians, Migration to the Americas, Americas, North America, South America, Central America, America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Indigenous People of the Americas, Race, Ethnicity, Genetics, Race in America, 23andme, 23 and me, History, History of the Americas, who are the real native americans, Mayans, Aztecs, Latin America, Hispanics, DNA of Native Americans, DNA, First Nations, DNA test, sjw

Id: dpE7-sQos9M

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2017