title: Little Richard

text: Richard felt that producers on his labels worked in not promoting his records during this period. Later, he claimed they kept trying to push him to records similar to Motown and felt he wasn't treated with appropriate respect. Richard often performed in dingy clubs and lounges with little support from his label. While Richard managed to perform in huge venues overseas such as in England and France, in the U.S. Richard had to perform on the Chitlin' Circuit. Richard's flamboyant look, while a hit during the 1950s, failed to help his labels to promote him to more conservative black record buyers. Richard later claimed that his decision to "backslide" from his ministry, led religious clergymen to protest his new recordings. Making matters worse, Richard said, was his insistence on performing in front of integrated audiences at the time of the black liberation movement shortly after the Watts riots and the formation of the Black Panthers which caused many black radio disk jockeys in certain areas of the country, including Los Angeles, to choose not to play his music. Now acting as his manager, Larry Williams convinced Richard to focus on his live shows. By 1968, he had ditched the Upsetters for his new backup band, the Crown Jewels, performing on the Canadian TV show, "Where It's At". Richard was also featured on the Monkees TV special "33⅓ Revolutions per Monkee" in April 1969. Williams booked Richard shows in Las Vegas casinos and resorts, leading Richard to adopt a wilder, flamboyant, and androgynous look, inspired by the success of his former backing guitarist Jimi Hendrix. Richard was soon booked at rock festivals such as the Atlantic City Pop Festival where he stole the show from headliner Janis Joplin. Richard produced a similar show stealer at the Toronto Pop Festival with John Lennon as the headliner. These successes brought Little Richard to talk shows such as the "Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and the "Dick Cavett Show", making him a major celebrity again.


title: Little Richard

text: Responding to his reputation as a successful concert performer, Reprise Records signed Richard in 1970 and he released the album, "The Rill Thing", with the philosophical single, "Freedom Blues", becoming his biggest charted single in years. In May 1970, Richard made the cover of "Rolling Stone" magazine. Despite the success of "Freedom Blues", none of Richard's other Reprise singles charted with the exception of "Greenwood, Mississippi", a swamp rock original by guitar hero, Travis Wammack, who incidentally played on the track. It charted only briefly on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and Cash Box pop chart, also on the "Billboard" Country charts; made a strong showing on WWRL in New York, before disappearing. Richard became a featured guest instrumentalist and vocalist on recordings by acts such as Delaney and Bonnie, Joey Covington and Joe Walsh and was prominently featured on Canned Heat's 1972 hit single, "Rockin' with the King". To keep up with his finances and bookings, Richard and three of his brothers formed a management company, Bud Hole Incorporated.


title: Little Richard

text: On American TV, Richard announced that he would be in a Rock Hudson motion picture, playing "The Insane Minister". (The appearance has never seen the light of day.) He also mentioned a new project involving Mick Jagger and Joe Cocker, celebrating his 20 years in show business, though it was never realized. By 1972, Richard had entered the rock and roll revival circuit, and that year, he co-headlined the London Rock and Roll Show at Wembley Stadium with his musical peer Chuck Berry where he'd come on stage and announce himself "the king of rock and roll", fittingly also the title of his 1971 album with Reprise and told the packed audience there to "let it all hang out"; Richard, however, was booed during the show when he climbed on top of his piano and stopped singing; he also seemed to ignore much of the crowd. To make matters worse, he showed up with just five musicians and struggled through low lighting and bad microphones. When the concert film documenting the show came out, his performance was considered generally strong, though his fans noticed a drop in energy and vocal artistry. Two songs he performed did not make the final cut of the film. The following year, he recorded a charting soul ballad, "In the Middle of the Night", released with proceeds donated to victims of tornadoes that had caused damage in twelve states.


title: Little Richard

text: Richard did no new recordings in 1974, although two "new" albums were released. In the summer, came a major surprise for fans, "Talkin' 'bout Soul", a collection of released and unreleased Vee Jay recordings, all never before on a domestic LP. Two were new to the world: the title tune and "You'd Better Stop", both uptempo.


title: Little Richard

text: Later that year came a set recorded in one night, early the previous year, called "Right Now!", and featuring "roots" material, including a vocal version of an unreleased Reprise instrumental "Mississippi", released in 1972 as "Funky Dish Rag"; his third try at his gospel -rock "In the Name"; and a 6 minute plus rocker, "Hot Nuts", based upon a 1936 song by Li'l Johnson ("Get 'Em From The Peanut Man").


title: Little Richard

text: 1975 was a big year for Richard, with a world tour, and acclaim over high energy performances throughout England and France. His band was perhaps his best, to date. He cut a top 40 single (US and Canada), with Bachman-Turner Overdrive, "Take It Like a Man". He worked on new songs with sideman, Seabrun "Candy" Hunter. He told Dee-Jay, Wolfman Jack, that he planned on releasing a new album with Sly Stone, but it never materialized. In 1976, he decided to retire again, physically and mentally exhausted, having experienced family tragedy and the drug culture. He was talked into once again recutting his greatest hits, for Stan Shulman in Nashville. This time, they would not use new arrangements but original arrangements. Richard re-recorded eighteen of his classic rock and roll hits, for K-Tel Records, in high tech stereo recreations, with a single featuring the new versions of "Good Golly Miss Molly" and "Rip It Up" reaching the UK singles chart. Richard later admitted that he was heavily addicted to drugs and alcohol.


title: Little Richard

text: By 1977, worn out from years of drug abuse and wild partying as well as a string of personal tragedies, Richard quit rock and roll again and returned to evangelism, releasing one gospel album, "God's Beautiful City", in 1979.


title: Little Richard

text: At the same time, while touring once again as a minister and returning to talk shows, a controversial album was released by the discount label, Koala, taken from a 1974 concert. It includes an 11 minute discordant version of "Good Golly, Miss Molly". The performances are widely panned as subpar and it has gained some notoriety amongst record collectors.


title: Little Richard

text: In 1984, Richard filed a $112 million lawsuit against Specialty Records, Art Rupe and his publishing company, Venice Music, and ATV Music for not paying royalties to him after he left the label in 1959. The suit was settled out of court in 1986. According to some reports, Michael Jackson allegedly gave him monetary compensation for his work, which he co-owned with Sony-ATV, songs by the Beatles and Richard. In September 1984, Charles White released the singer's authorized biography, "Quasar of Rock: The Life and Times of Little Richard", which returned Richard to the spotlight. Richard returned to show business in what "Rolling Stone" would refer to as a "formidable comeback" following the book's release.


title: Little Richard

text: Reconciling his roles as evangelist and rock and roll musician for the first time, Richard stated that the genre could be used for good or evil. After accepting a role in the film "Down and Out in Beverly Hills", Richard and Billy Preston penned the faith-based rock and roll song "Great Gosh A'Mighty" for its soundtrack. Richard won critical acclaim for his film role, and the song found success on the American and British charts. The hit led to the release of the album "Lifetime Friend" (1986) on Warner Bros. Records, with songs deemed "messages in rhythm", including a gospel rap track. In addition to a version of "Great Gosh A'Mighty", cut in England, the album featured two singles that charted in the UK, "Somebody's Comin'" and "Operator". Richard spent much of the rest of the decade as a guest on television shows and appearing in films, winning new fans with what was referred to as his "unique comedic timing."


title: Little Richard

text: In 1988, he surprised fans with a serious tribute to Otis Redding at his Rock and Roll of Fame induction ceremony, singing several Redding songs, including "Fa Fa Fa (sad song)", "These arms of mine", and "Dock of the Bay ". He told Otis' story and explained how his 1956 tune "All Around the World" was Redding's reference on his 1963 side, "Hey, Hey Baby".


title: Little Richard

text: In 1989, Richard provided rhythmic preaching and background vocals on the extended live version of the U2–B.B. King hit "When Love Comes to Town". That same year, Richard returned to singing his classic hits following a performance of "Lucille" at an AIDS benefit concert.


title: Little Richard

text: In 1990, Richard contributed a spoken-word rap on Living Colour's hit song, "Elvis Is Dead", from their album "Time's Up". That same year he appeared in a cameo for the music video of Cinderella's "Shelter Me". In 1991, he was one of the featured performers on the hit single and video "Voices That Care" that was produced to help boost the morale of U.S. troops involved in Operation Desert Storm. The same year, he recorded a version of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" for the Pediatric AIDS Foundation benefit album "For Our Children". The album's success led to a deal with Walt Disney Records, resulting in the release of a hit 1992 children's album, "Shake It All About".


title: Little Richard

text: In 1994, Richard sang the theme song to the award-winning PBS Kids and TLC animated television series "The Magic School Bus" based on the book series created by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen and published by Scholastic Corporation. He also opened Wrestlemania X from Madison Square Garden on March 20 that year miming to his reworked rendition of "America the Beautiful".


title: Little Richard

text: Throughout the 1990s, Richard performed around the world and appeared on TV, film, and tracks with other artists, including Jon Bon Jovi, Elton John and Solomon Burke. In 1992 he released his final album, "Little Richard Meets Masayoshi Takanaka" featuring members of Richard's then current touring band.


title: Little Richard

text: In 2000, Richard's life was dramatized for the biographical film "Little Richard", which focused on his early years, including his heyday, his religious conversion and his return to secular music in the early 1960s. Richard was played by Leon Robinson, who earned an NAACP Image Award nomination for his performance. In 2002, Richard contributed to the Johnny Cash tribute album, "". In 2004–2005, he released two sets of unreleased and rare cuts, from the Okeh label 1966/67 and the Reprise label 1970/72. Included was the full "Southern Child" album, produced and composed mostly by Richard, scheduled for release in 1972, but shelved. In 2006, Little Richard was featured in a popular advertisement for the GEICO brand. A 2005 recording of his duet vocals with Jerry Lee Lewis on a cover of the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" was included on Lewis's 2006 album, "Last Man Standing". The same year, Richard was a guest judge on the TV series "Celebrity Duets". Richard and Lewis performed alongside John Fogerty at the 2008 Grammy Awards in a tribute to the two artists considered to be cornerstones of rock and roll by the NARAS. That same year, Richard appeared on radio host Don Imus' benefit album for sick children, "The Imus Ranch Record". In June 2010, Richard recorded a gospel track for an upcoming tribute album to songwriting legend Dottie Rambo. In 2009, Richard was Inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall Of Fame in a concert in New Orleans, attended by Fats Domino.


title: Little Richard

text: Throughout the first decade of the new millennium, Richard kept up a stringent touring schedule, performing primarily in the United States and Europe. However, sciatic nerve pain in his left leg and then replacement of the involved hip began affecting the frequency of his performances by 2010. Despite his health problems, Richard continued to perform to receptive audiences and critics. "Rolling Stone" reported that at a performance at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C., in June 2012, Richard was "still full of fire, still a master showman, his voice still loaded with deep gospel and raunchy power." Richard performed a full 90-minute show at the Pensacola Interstate Fair in Pensacola, Florida, in October 2012, at the age of 79, and headlined at the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas during Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend in March 2013. In September 2013, "Rolling Stone" published an interview with Richard who said that he would be retiring from performing. "I am done, in a sense, because I don't feel like doing anything right now", he told the magazine, adding, "I think my legacy should be that when I started in showbusiness there wasn't no such thing as rock'n'roll. When I started with 'Tutti Frutti', that's when rock really started rocking." Richard would perform one last concert in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 2014.


title: Little Richard

text: In June 2015, Richard appeared before a benefit concert audience, clad in sparkly boots and a brightly colored jacket at the Wildhorse Saloon in Nashville to receive the Rhapsody & Rhythm Award from and raise funds for the National Museum of African American Music. It was reported that he charmed the crowd by reminiscing about his early days working in Nashville nightclubs. In May 2016, the National Museum of African American Music issued a press release indicating that Richard was one of the key artists and music industry leaders that attended its third annual Celebration of Legends Luncheon in Nashville honoring Shirley Caesar, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff with Rhapsody & Rhythm Awards. In 2016, a new CD was released on Hitman Records, "California (I'm Comin')" with released and previously unreleased material from the 1970s, including an a cappella version of his 1975 single release, "Try to Help Your Brother". On September 6, 2017, Richard participated in a long television interview for the Christian Three Angels Broadcasting Network, appearing in a wheelchair, clean-shaven, without make-up, dressed in a blue paisley coat and tie, where he discussed his lifelong Christian faith.


title: Little Richard

text: On October 23, 2019, Richard addressed the audience after appearing to receive the Distinguished Artist Award at the 2019 Tennessee Governor's Arts Awards at the Governor's Residence in Nashville, Tennessee.


title: Little Richard

text: Around 1956, Richard became involved with Audrey Robinson, a sixteen-year-old college student, originally from Savannah, Georgia. Richard and Robinson quickly got acquainted despite Robinson not being a fan of rock and roll music. Richard said in his 1984 autobiography that he invited other men to have sexual encounters with her, including Buddy Holly. Robinson denied those statements. Richard proposed marriage to Robinson but she refused. Robinson later became known under the name Lee Angel as a stripper and socialite. Richard reconnected with Robinson in the 1960s, though she left him again after his drug abuse worsened. Robinson was interviewed for Richard's 1985 documentary on "The South Bank Show" and denied Richard's statements. According to Robinson, Richard would use her to buy food in white-only fast food stores as he could not enter any due to the color of his skin.


title: Little Richard

text: Richard met his only wife, Ernestine Harvin, at an evangelical rally in October 1957. They began dating that year and wed on July 12, 1959, in California. According to Harvin, she and Richard initially enjoyed a happy marriage with "normal" sexual relations. When the marriage ended in divorce in 1964, Harvin said it was due to her husband's celebrity status, which had made life difficult for her. Richard said the marriage fell apart due to his being a neglectful husband and because of his sexuality. Both Robinson and Harvin denied Richard's statements that he was gay, and Richard believed they did not know it because he was "such a pumper in those days". During the marriage, Richard and Harvin adopted a one-year-old boy, Danny Jones, from a late church associate. Richard and his son remained close, with Jones often acting as one of his bodyguards. Harvin later married Mcdonald Campbell in Santa Barbara, California, on March 23, 1975.


title: Little Richard

text: In 1984, Richard said that he just played with girls as a child and was subjected to homosexual jokes and ridicule because of his manner of walking and talking. His father brutally punished him whenever he caught him wearing his mother's makeup and clothing. The singer said he had been sexually involved with both sexes as a teenager. Because of his effeminate mannerisms, his father kicked him out of their family home when he was fifteen. In 1985, on "The South Bank Show", Richard explained, "my daddy put me out of the house. He said he wanted seven boys, and I had spoiled it, because I was gay."


title: Little Richard

text: Richard got involved in voyeurism in his early twenties. A female friend would drive him around picking up men who would allow him to watch them having sex in the backseat of cars. Richard's activity caught the attention of Macon police in 1955 and he was arrested after a gas station attendant reported sexual activity in a car Richard was occupying with a heterosexual couple. Cited on a sexual misconduct charge, he spent three days in jail and was temporarily banned from performing in Macon.


title: Little Richard

text: In the early 1950s, Richard became acquainted with openly gay musician Billy Wright, who helped in establishing Richard's look, advising him to use pancake makeup on his face and wear his hair in a long-haired pompadour style similar to his. As Richard got used to the makeup, he ordered his band, the Upsetters, to wear makeup too, in order to gain entry into predominantly white venues. He later stated, "I wore the make-up so that white men wouldn't think I was after the white girls. It made things easier for me, plus it was colorful too." In 2000, Richard told "Jet" magazine, "I figure if being called a sissy would make me famous, let them say what they want to." Richard's look, however, still attracted female audiences, who would send him naked photos and their phone numbers. Groupies began throwing undergarments at Richard during performances.


title: Little Richard

text: During Richard's heyday, his obsession with voyeurism and group sex continued, his girlfriend Audrey Robinson participating. Richard wrote that Robinson would have sex with men while she sexually stimulated Richard. Despite saying he was "born again" after leaving rock and roll for the church in 1957, Richard left Oakwood College after exposing himself to a male student. The incident was reported to the student's father, and Richard withdrew from the college. In 1962, Richard was arrested for spying on men urinating in toilets at a Trailways bus station in Long Beach, California. He participated in orgies and continued to be a voyeur.


title: Little Richard

text: On May 4, 1982, on "Late Night with David Letterman", Richard said, "God gave me the victory. I'm not gay now, but, you know, I was gay all my life. I believe I was one of the first gay people to come out. But God let me know that he made Adam be with Eve, not Steve. So, I gave my heart to Christ." In his 1984 book, while demeaning homosexuality as "unnatural" and "contagious", he told Charles White he was "omnisexual".


title: Little Richard

text: In 1995, Richard told "Penthouse" that he always knew he was gay, saying "I've been gay all my life". In 2007, "Mojo Magazine" referred to Richard as "bisexual". In October 2017, Richard once again denounced homosexuality in an interview with the Christian Three Angels Broadcasting Network, calling homosexual and transgender identity "unnatural affection" that goes against "the way God wants you to live".


title: Little Richard

text: During his initial heyday in the 1950s rock and roll scene, Richard was a teetotaler abstaining from alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Richard often fined bandmates for drug and alcohol use during this era. By the mid-1960s, however, Richard began drinking heavy amounts of alcohol and smoking cigarettes and marijuana. By 1972, he had developed an addiction to cocaine. He later lamented that period, "They should have called me Lil Cocaine, I was sniffing so much of that stuff!" By 1975, he had developed addictions to both heroin and PCP, otherwise known as "angel dust". His drug and alcohol use began to affect his professional career and personal life. "I lost my reasoning", he later recalled.


title: Little Richard

text: He said of his cocaine addiction that he did whatever he could to use cocaine. Richard admitted that his addictions to cocaine, PCP and heroin were costing him as much as $1,000 a day. In 1977, longtime friend Larry Williams once showed up with a gun and threatened to kill him for failing to pay his drug debt. Richard said that this was the most fearful moment of his life; Williams' own drug addiction made him wildly unpredictable. Richard did acknowledge that he and Williams were "very close friends" and when reminiscing of the drug-fueled clash, he recalled thinking "I knew he loved me—I hoped he did!" Within that same year, Richard had several devastating personal experiences, including his brother Tony's death of a heart attack, the accidental shooting of his nephew whom he loved like a son, and the murder of two close personal friends – one a valet at "the heroin man's house." These experiences convinced the singer to give up drugs and alcohol, along with rock and roll, and return to the ministry.


title: Little Richard

text: Richard's family had deep evangelical (Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME)) Christian roots, including two uncles and a grandfather who were preachers. He also took part in Macon's Pentecostal churches, which were his favorites mainly due to their music, charismatic praise, dancing in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues. At age ten, influenced by Pentecostalism, he would go around saying he was a faith healer, singing gospel music to people who were feeling sick and touching them. He later recalled that they would often indicate that they felt better after he prayed for them and would sometimes give him money. Richard had aspirations of being a preacher due to the influence of singing evangelist Brother Joe May.


title: Little Richard

text: After he was born again in 1957, Richard enrolled at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, a mostly black Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) college, to study theology. It was also at this time that he became a vegetarian which coincided with his return to religion. Richard returned to secular music in the early 1960s. He was eventually ordained a minister in 1970 and resumed evangelical activities in 1977. Richard represented Memorial Bibles International and sold their Black Heritage Bible, which highlighted the Book's many black characters. As a preacher, he evangelized in small churches and packed auditoriums of 20,000 or more. His preaching focused on uniting the races and bringing lost souls to repentance through God's love. In 1984, Richard's mother, Leva Mae, died following a period of illness. Only a few months prior to her death, Richard promised her that he would remain a Christian.


title: Little Richard

text: During the 1980s and 1990s, Richard officiated at celebrity weddings. In 2006, in one ceremony, Richard wedded twenty couples who won a contest. The musician used his experience and knowledge as a minister and elder statesman of rock and roll to preach at funerals of musical friends such as Wilson Pickett and Ike Turner. At a benefit concert in 2009 to raise funds to help rebuild children's playgrounds that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, Richard asked guest of honor Fats Domino to pray with him and others. His assistants handed out inspirational booklets at the concert, a common practice at Richard's shows. Richard told a Howard Theatre, Washington, D.C., audience in June 2012, "I know this is not Church, but get close to the Lord. The world is getting close to the end. Get close to the Lord." In 2013, Richard elaborated on his spiritual philosophies, stating "God talked to me the other night. He said He's getting ready to come. The world's getting ready to end and He's coming, wrapped in flames of fire with a rainbow around his throne." "Rolling Stone" reported that his apocalyptic prophesies generated snickers from some audience members as well as cheers of support. Richard responded to the laughter by stating: "When I talk to you about [Jesus], I'm not playing. I'm almost 81 years old. Without God, I wouldn't be here."


title: Little Richard

text: In 1986, it was reported that Richard converted to Judaism at the encouragement of Bob Dylan—but "Richard saw Judaism as not contradicting his other beliefs."


title: Little Richard

text: In 2017, Richard returned to his SDA spiritual roots and appeared in a lengthy televised interview on 3ABN and later he shared his personal testimony at 3ABN Fall Camp Meeting 2017.


title: Little Richard

text: In October 1985, having finished his album "Lifetime Friend", Richard returned from England to film a guest spot on the show "Miami Vice". Following the taping, he accidentally crashed his sports car into a telephone pole in West Hollywood, California. He suffered a broken right leg, broken ribs and head and facial injuries. His recovery from the accident took several months, preventing him from attending the inaugural Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in January 1986 where he was one of several inductees. He instead supplied a recorded message.


title: Little Richard

text: In 2007, Richard began having problems walking due to sciatica in his left leg, requiring him to use crutches. In November 2009, he entered a hospital to have replacement surgery on his left hip. Despite returning to performing the following year, Richard's problems with his hip continued and he was brought onstage in a wheelchair, only being able to play sitting down. On September 30, 2013, he revealed to CeeLo Green at a Recording Academy fundraiser that he had suffered a heart attack at home the week before. Taking aspirin and having his son turn on the air conditioner saved his life according to his doctor. Richard stated, "Jesus had something for me. He brought me through."


title: Little Richard

text: On April 28, 2016, Richard's friend Bootsy Collins stated on his Facebook page that, "he is not in the best of health so I ask all the Funkateers to lift him up." Reports began being posted on the internet stating that Richard was in grave health and that his family were gathering at his bedside. On May 3, 2016, "Rolling Stone" provided a health update by Richard and his lawyer; Richard stated, "not only is my family not gathering around me because I'm ill, but I'm still singing. I don't perform like I used to, but I have my singing voice, I walk around, I had hip surgery a while ago but I'm healthy.'" His lawyer said, "He's 83. I don't know how many 83-year-olds still get up and rock it out every week, but in light of the rumors, I wanted to tell you that he's vivacious and conversant about a ton of different things and he's still very active in a daily routine." Though Richard continued to sing in his eighties, he kept away from the stage.


title: Little Richard

text: On May 9, 2020, after a two month illness, Richard died at the age of 87 at his home in Tullahoma, Tennessee, from a cause related to bone cancer. His brother, sister, and son were with him at the time. Richard received tributes from many popular musicians, including Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, John Fogerty, Elton John, and Lenny Kravitz, as well as many others, such as film director John Waters, who were influenced by Richard's music and persona. He is interred at Oakwood University Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Huntsville, Alabama.


title: Little Richard

text: Richard was nicknamed the "Architect of Rock and Roll". His music and performance style had a pivotal effect on the shape of the sound and style of popular music genres of the 20th century. As a rock and roll pioneer, Richard embodied its spirit more flamboyantly than any other performer. Richard's raspy shouting style gave the genre one of its most identifiable and influential vocal sounds and his fusion of boogie-woogie, New Orleans R&B and gospel music blazed its rhythmic trail. Richard's innovative emotive vocalizations and uptempo rhythmic music also played a key role in the formation of other popular music genres, including soul and funk, respectively. He influenced numerous singers and musicians across musical genres from rock to hip hop; his music helped shape rhythm and blues for generations to come.


title: Little Richard

text: Combining elements of boogie, gospel, and blues, Richard introduced several of rock music's most characteristic musical features, including its loud volume and vocal style emphasizing power, and its distinctive beat and innovative visceral rhythms. He departed from boogie-woogie's shuffle rhythm and introduced a new distinctive rock beat, where the beat division is even at all tempos. He reinforced the new rock rhythm with a two-handed approach, playing patterns with his right hand, with the rhythm typically popping out in the piano's high register. His new rhythm, which he introduced with "Tutti Frutti" (1955), became the basis for the standard rock beat, which was later consolidated by Chuck Berry. "Lucille" (1957) foreshadowed the rhythmic feel of 1960s classic rock in several ways, including its heavy bassline, slower tempo, strong rock beat played by the entire band, and verse–chorus form similar to blues.


title: Little Richard

text: Richard's voice was able to generate croons, wails, and screams unprecedented in popular music. He was cited by two of soul music's pioneers, Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, as contributing to the genre's early development. Redding stated that most of his music was patterned after Richard's, referring to his 1953 recording "Directly From My Heart To You" as the personification of soul, and that he had "done a lot for [him] and [his] soul brothers in the music business." Cooke said in 1962 that Richard had done "so much for our music". Cooke had a top 40 hit in 1963 with his cover of Richard's 1956 hit "Send Me Some Loving".


title: Little Richard

text: James Brown and others credited Richard and his mid-1950s backing band, The Upsetters, with having been the first to put the funk in the rock beat. This innovation sparked the transition from 1950s rock and roll to 1960s funk.


title: Little Richard

text: Richard's hits of the mid-1950s, such as "Tutti Frutti", "Long Tall Sally", "Keep A-Knockin'" and "Good Golly, Miss Molly", were generally characterized by playful lyrics with sexually suggestive connotations. AllMusic writer Richie Unterberger stated that Little Richard "merged the fire of gospel with New Orleans R&B, pounding the piano and wailing with gleeful abandon", and that while "other R&B greats of the early 1950s had been moving in a similar direction, none of them matched the sheer electricity of Richard's vocals. With his high-speed deliveries, ecstatic trills, and the overjoyed force of personality in his singing, he was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock and roll." Due to his innovative music and style, he's often widely acknowledged as the "architect of rock and roll".


title: Little Richard

text: Emphasizing the folk influences of Richard, English professor W. T. Lhamon Jr. wrote, "His songs were literally good booty. They were the repressed stuff of underground lore. And in Little Richard they found a vehicle prepared to bear their chocked energy, at least for his capsulated moment."


title: Little Richard

text: Ray Charles introduced him at a concert in 1988 as "a man that started a kind of music that set the pace for a lot of what's happening today." Richard's contemporaries, including Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Pat Boone, the Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, all recorded covers of his works. As they wrote about him for their Man of the Year – Legend category in 2010, "GQ" magazine stated that Richard "is, without question, the boldest and most influential of the founding fathers of rock'n'roll."


title: Little Richard

text: In addition to his musical style, Richard was cited as one of the first crossover black artists, reaching audiences of all races. His music and concerts broke the color line, drawing blacks and whites together despite attempts to sustain segregation. As H.B. Barnum explained in "Quasar of Rock", Little Richard "opened the door. He brought the races together." Barnum described Richard's music as not being "boy-meets-girl-girl-meets-boy things, they were "fun" records, all fun. And they had a lot to say sociologically in our country and the world." Barnum also stated that Richard's "charisma was a whole new thing to the music business", explaining that "he would burst onto the stage from anywhere, and you wouldn't be able to hear anything but the roar of the audience. He might come out and walk on the piano. He might go out into the audience." Barnum also stated that Richard was innovative in that he would wear colorful capes, blouse shirts, makeup and suits studded with multi-colored stones and sequins, and that he also brought flickering stage lighting from his show business experience into performance venues where rock and roll artists performed. In 2015, the National Museum of African American Music honored Richard for helping to shatter the color line on the music charts changing American culture forever.


title: Little Richard

text: Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister of the heavy metal band Motörhead spoke highly of Penneman, stating: "Little Richard was always my main man. How hard must it have been for him: gay, black and singing in the South? But his records are a joyous good time from beginning to end."


title: Little Richard

text: Richard influenced generations of performers across musical genres. Quincy Jones stated that Richard was "an innovator whose influence spans America's musical diaspora from Gospel, the Blues & R&B, to Rock & Roll, & Hip-Hop." James Brown and Otis Redding both idolized him. Brown allegedly came up with the Famous Flames debut hit, "Please, Please, Please", after Richard had written the words on a napkin. Redding started his professional career with Richard's band, The Upsetters. and first entered a talent show performing Richard's "Heeby Jeebies", winning for fifteen consecutive weeks. Ike Turner claimed most of Tina Turner's early vocal delivery was based on Richard, something Richard reiterated in the introduction of Turner's autobiography, "Takin' Back My Name". Bob Dylan first performed covers of Richard's songs on piano in high school with his rock and roll group, the Golden Chords; in 1959 when leaving school, he wrote in his yearbook under "Ambition": "to join Little Richard". Jimi Hendrix was influenced in appearance (clothing and hairstyle/mustache) and sound by Richard. He was quoted in 1966 saying, "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice." Others influenced by Richard early on in their lives included Bob Seger and John Fogerty. Michael Jackson admitted that Richard had been a huge influence on him prior to the release of "Off the Wall". Rock critics noted similarities between Prince's androgynous look, music and vocal style and Richard's.


title: Little Richard

text: The origins of Cliff Richard's name change from Harry Webb was seen as a partial tribute to his musical hero Richard and singer Rick Richards. The members of the Beatles were heavily influenced by Richard, including Paul McCartney and George Harrison. McCartney idolized him in school and later used his recordings as inspiration for his uptempo rockers, such as "I'm Down". "Long Tall Sally" was the first song McCartney performed in public. McCartney would later state, "I could do Little Richard's voice, which is a wild, hoarse, screaming thing. It's like an out-of-body experience. You have to leave your current sensibilities and go about a foot above your head to sing it." During the Beatles' Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Harrison commented, "thank you all very much, especially the rock 'n' rollers, an' Little Richard there, if it wasn't for (gesturing to Little Richard), it was all his fault, really." Upon hearing "Long Tall Sally" in 1956, John Lennon later commented that he was so impressed that he "couldn't speak". Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were also profoundly influenced by Richard, with Jagger citing him as his introduction to R&B music and referring to him as "the originator and my first idol". Late 1960s hard rock and heavy metal pioneer John Kay of Steppenwolf, as a young teen who did not understand the English language in East Prussia in the mid-1950s, was first inspired by rock 'n' roll music upon hearing Little Richard's 'Tutti Frutti' on a U.S. Armed Forces station on a homemade radio in 1956. Kay would later state, "it was unlike anything I ever heard before and it was instant 'chicken skin time' - I mean goosebumps from head to toe. From that time on my focus was to hear as much of that stuff as possible, and after a while it became a kind of adolescent dream that someday [I] would be on the other side of the ocean, would learn how to speak English, and this music is something that I would play." Richard was also the first rock n roll influence on Rod Stewart, Peter Wolf, and Robert Plant. Plant was not interested in listening to music until he heard Little Richard on record, later stating, "I was a 13-year-old boy in Kidderminster when I heard Little Richard for the first time. My parents shielded me from anything that was worldly. I spent my time searching feverishly through my stamp collection or working on my Meccano, and then someone played me Good Golly, Miss Molly. The sound! It was fantastic, indescribable." David Bowie called Richard his "inspiration" stating upon listening to "Tutti Frutti" that he "heard God".


title: Little Richard

text: After opening for him with his band Bluesology, pianist Reginald Dwight was inspired to be a "rock and roll piano player", later changing his name to Elton John. Farrokh Bulsara performed covers of Richard's songs as a teen, before finding fame as Freddie Mercury, frontman for Queen. Lou Reed referred to Richard as his "rock and roll hero", deriving inspiration from "the soulful, primal force" of the sound Richard and his saxophonist made on "Long Tall Sally". Reed later stated, "I don't know why and I don't care, but I wanted to go to wherever that sound was and make a life." Patti Smith said, "To me, Little Richard was a person that was able to focus a certain physical, anarchistic, and spiritual energy into a form which we call rock 'n' roll ... I understood it as something that had to do with my future. When I was a little girl, Santa Claus didn't turn me on. Easter Bunny didn't turn me on. God turned me on. Little Richard turned me on." The music of Deep Purple and Motörhead was also heavily influenced by Richard, as well as that of AC/DC. The latter's early lead vocalist and co-songwriter Bon Scott idolized Richard and aspired to sing like him, its lead guitarist and co-songwriter Angus Young was first inspired to play guitar after listening to Richard's music, and rhythm guitarist and co-writer Malcolm Young derived his signature sound from playing his guitar like Richard's piano. Later performers such as Mystikal, André "3000" Benjamin of Outkast and Bruno Mars were cited by critics as having emulated Richard's style in their own works. Mystikal's rap vocal delivery was compared to Richard's. André 3000's vocals in Outkast's hit, "Hey Ya!", were compared to an "indie rock Little Richard". Bruno Mars declared that Richard was one of his and his performer-father's primary early influences. Mars' song, "Runaway Baby" from his album, "Doo-Wops & Hooligans" was cited by "The New York Times" as "channeling Little Richard". Prior to his death in 2017, Audioslave's and Soundgarden's frontman Chris Cornell traced his musical influences back to Richard via the Beatles.


title: Little Richard

text: In the early 1990s, a portion of Mercer University Drive (between Telfair and College Streets) in Macon, Georgia, was renamed "Little Richard Penniman Boulevard". Just south of the easternmost portion of the renamed boulevard lies Little Richard Penniman Park.


title: Little Richard

text: In 2007, an eclectic panel of renowned recording artists voted "Tutti Frutti" number one on "Mojo"s "The Top 100 Records That Changed The World", hailing the recording as "the sound of the birth of rock and roll". In April 2012, "Rolling Stone" magazine declared that the song "still has the most inspired rock lyric on record". The same recording was inducted to the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry in 2010, with the library claiming the "unique vocalizing over the irresistible beat announced a new era in music".


title: Little Richard

text: In 2010, "Time" magazine listed "Here's Little Richard" as one of the 100 Greatest and Most Influential Albums of All Time. "Rolling Stone" listed his "Here's Little Richard" at number fifty on the magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. He was ranked eighth on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. "Rolling Stone" listed three of Richard's recordings, "The Girl Can't Help It", "Long Tall Sally" and "Tutti Frutti", on their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Two of the latter songs and "Good Golly, Miss Molly" were listed on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.


title: Little Richard

text: Richard appeared in person to receive an honorary degree from his hometown's Mercer University in May 2013. The day before the doctorate of humanities degree was to be bestowed upon him, the mayor of Macon announced that one of Richard's childhood homes, an historic site, would be moved to a rejuvenated section of that city's Pleasant Hill district to be restored and named the Little Richard Penniman—Pleasant Hill Resource House. It would serve as a meeting place where local history and artifacts provided by will be displayed.


title: Little Richard

text: In early 2019, Maggie Gonzalez, a resident of Macon, Georgia, began an online campaign proposing that a statue of Richard be erected in downtown Macon, taking the place of a Confederate memorial that currently occupies the space. Georgia law forbids the tearing down of Confederate statues, though they can be relocated; Gonzalez has proposed that it could be moved to nearby Rose Hill Cemetery.


title: Little Richard

text: On March 14, 2021, Bruno Mars with Anderson .Paak performed at the 2021 Grammy Award ceremony to honor Little Richard. The performance was reported in the media to be the highlight of the show.


title: Little Richard

text: Although Richard never won a competitive Grammy (his classic run of hits ended before the Grammys commenced), he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993. His album "Here's Little Richard" and three of his songs ("Tutti Frutti", "Lucille" and "Long Tall Sally") are inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.


title: Little Richard

text: In 2014, actor Brandon Mychal Smith received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Richard in the James Brown biographical drama film "Get on Up". Mick Jagger co-produced the motion picture.


title: Little Richard

text: In 2022, Alton Mason portrayed Little Richard in the movie biopic, "Elvis", directed by Baz Luhrmann.


title: Bella Poarch

text: Denarie Taylor (born February 9, 1997), known professionally as Bella Poarch ( ), is a Filipino-born American singer and social media personality. On August 17, 2020, she created the most liked video on TikTok, in which she lip syncs to the song "M to the B" by British rapper Millie B. She is the most followed TikTok contributor in the Philippines. In May 2021, she released her debut single "Build a Bitch".


title: Bella Poarch

text: Bella Poarch was born on February 9, 1997, in the Philippines to Filipino parents. She was raised by her grandmother in the slums until the age of three and was then adopted. Her adoptive father is an American who had served in the US military and her adoptive mother is Filipino; both adoptive parents had met in Saudi Arabia where her adoptive father was stationed, before settling in the Philippines. In an interview, she recounts that she and her adopted brother were heavily abused all throughout her childhood, up until her enrollment in the military. She lived on a farm with her family: two older (adopted) sisters, her adoptive parents, and her brother. She had many of the responsibilities for the farm, even as young as seven years old. She recounts that her adoptive sisters did not receive the same treatment as her. Poarch says that her father was verbally and physically abusive, while her mother did not get involved. Her family (except her two older sisters who still reside in the Philippines) moved to San Francisco to live with her aunt for a couple of months, before the family moved to Texas when she was 13 due to her father's need for bypass surgery. She says that the abuse decreased, but she still faced some mental abuse from her father at home.


title: Bella Poarch

text: In January 2020, Poarch created her TikTok account. She started actively posting on TikTok based on gaming and cosplay content in April 2020. She gained notability in August 2020, when her lip sync videos went viral, most notably her video where she is lip-syncing to "Sophie Aspin Send" by Millie B. The zoomed-in video of her lip-syncing to that tune and rhythmically bouncing went viral and became one of TikTok's most liked videos of all time. Following her TikTok success, she launched a YouTube channel and Twitter page in the months after she joined TikTok.


title: Bella Poarch

text: Poarch is also associated with her alpaca stuffed toy. In 2020, she released a limited clothing line RIPNDIP x Paca Collaboration.


title: Bella Poarch

text: In December 2020, Poarch's rising popularity peaked when she reportedly grabbed the interest of two large professional Esports organizations – 100 Thieves and FaZe Clan, which apparently showed interest in her, a live streamer and gamer at the time, as a content creator under their respective banners. In May 2021, Poarch signed a record deal with Warner Records.


title: Bella Poarch

text: On May 14, 2021, Poarch released her debut single "Build a Bitch". The associated music video, which appeared on YouTube, was described by "Billboard" as "an audacious, darkly comic slice of new-school pop", created with Daniel Virgil Maisonneuve, the producer-songwriter better known as Sub Urban." The video features other notable internet personalities including Valkyrae, Mia Khalifa, Bretman Rock and ZHC.


title: Bella Poarch

text: On an episode of the 100 Thieves podcast "The CouRage and Nadeshot Show", Poarch said that the song traces back to her own history of being bullied as a child. Poarch said on the podcast that she had wanted to become a singer since she was a child.


title: Bella Poarch

text: Poarch released her first EP, "Dolls", on August 12, 2022. It includes her previous singles, "Build a Bitch", "Inferno", and "Dolls", as well as new tracks "Villain", "No Man's Land", and "Living Hell". A music video for "Living Hell" debuted alongside the EP. In addition to co-starring in the music video for "Dolls", Grimes features on "No Man's Land". "Rolling Stone" praised the dark pop tone of the EP. In addition, "Villain" would be used for WWE's Extreme Rules premium live event in 2022.


title: Bella Poarch

text: Poarch is a U.S. Navy veteran. She enlisted in the Navy in 2017 as an aviation ordnanceman and served for three years, having been stationed in Japan and Hawaii.


title: Bella Poarch

text: She has expressed her support on social media for the Asian-American community due to the rise in reports of hate crimes towards them. She also shared her experiences with "Vogue", saying that she can relate to this situation because she has been "treated differently" and "randomly attacked and assaulted" as an Asian teen after moving to the U.S. from the Philippines.


title: Bella Poarch

text: In September 2020, Korean social media users criticized Poarch for having a tattoo similar to the Rising Sun Flag in her videos. The specific tattoo resembled a symbol of Japanese imperialism which is considered offensive to East Asians. She apologized and had it covered and later removed. Poarch married Tyler Poarch in 2019. She filed for divorce from him in November 2022.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Many Indigenous peoples of the Americas were traditionally hunter-gatherers and many, especially in the Amazon basin, still are, but many groups practiced aquaculture and agriculture. While some societies depended heavily on agriculture, others practiced a mix of farming, hunting, and gathering. In some regions, the Indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, city-states, chiefdoms, states, kingdoms, republics, confederacies, and empires. Some had varying degrees of knowledge of engineering, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, writing, physics, medicine, planting and irrigation, geology, mining, metallurgy, sculpture, and gold smithing.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: 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. Some, such as Quechua, Arawak, Aymara, Guaraní, Mayan, and Nahuatl, count their speakers in the millions. Many also maintain aspects of Indigenous cultural practices to varying degrees, including religion, social organization, and subsistence practices. Like most cultures, over time, cultures specific to many Indigenous peoples have evolved to incorporate traditional aspects but also cater to modern needs. Some Indigenous peoples still live in relative isolation from Western culture and a few are still counted as uncontacted peoples.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Application of the term "Indian" originated with Christopher Columbus, who, in his search for India, thought that he had arrived in the East Indies. Eventually, those islands came to be known as the "West Indies", a name still used. This led to the blanket term "Indies" and "Indians" (; ; ; ) for the Indigenous inhabitants, which implied some kind of ethnic or cultural unity among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. This unifying concept, codified in law, religion, and politics, was not originally accepted by the myriad groups of Indigenous peoples themselves, but has since been embraced or tolerated by many over the last two centuries. Even though the term "Indian" generally does not include the culturally and linguistically distinct Indigenous peoples of the Arctic regions of the Americas—such as the Aleuts, Inuit, or Yupik peoples, who entered the continent as a second, more recent wave of migration several thousand years later and have much more recent genetic and cultural commonalities with the Aboriginal peoples of the Asiatic Arctic Russian Far East—these groups are nonetheless considered "Indigenous peoples of the Americas".


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The term "Amerindian", a portmanteau of "American Indian", was coined in 1902 by the American Anthropological Association. However, it has been controversial since its creation. It was immediately rejected by some leading members of the Association, and, while adopted by many, it was never universally accepted. While never popular in Indigenous communities themselves, it remains a preferred term among some anthropologists, notably in some parts of Canada and the English-speaking Caribbean.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Indigenous peoples in Canada is used as the collective name for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. The term "Aboriginal peoples" as a collective noun (also describing First Nations, Inuit, and Métis) is a specific term of art used in some legal documents, including the Constitution Act, 1982, though in most Indigenous circles "Aboriginal" has also fallen into disfavor. Over time, as societal perceptions and government-Indigenous relationships have shifted, many historical terms have changed definition or been replaced as they have fallen out of favor. Use of the term "Indian" is frowned upon because it represents the imposition and restriction of Indigenous peoples and cultures by the Canadian Government. The terms "Native" and "Eskimo" are generally regarded as disrespectful, and so are rarely used unless specifically required. While "Indigenous peoples" is the preferred term, many individuals or communities may choose to self-describe their identity using a different term.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Métis people of Canada "can" be contrasted, for instance, to the Indigenous-European mixed race mestizos (or in Brazil) of Hispanic America who, with their larger population (in most Latin-American countries constituting either outright majorities, pluralities, or at the least large minorities), identify largely as a new ethnic group distinct from both Europeans and Indigenous, but still considering themselves a subset of the European-derived Hispanic or Brazilian peoplehood in culture and ethnicity (cf. ).


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Among Spanish-speaking countries, or ('Indigenous peoples') is a common term, though or ('native peoples') may also be heard; moreover, ('aborigine') is used in Argentina and ('original peoples') is common in Chile. In Brazil, or ('Indigenous peoples') are common of formal-sounding designations, while ('Indian') is still the more often-heard term (the noun for the South-Asian nationality being ). and is rarely used in Brazil in Indigenous-specific contexts (e.g., is usually understood as the ethnonym for Indigenous Australians). The Spanish and Portuguese equivalents to Indian, nevertheless, could be used to mean any hunter-gatherer or full-blooded Indigenous person, particularly to continents other than Europe or Africa—for example, .


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Indigenous peoples of the United States are commonly known as Native Americans, Indians, as well as Alaska Natives. The term "Indian" is still used in some communities and remains in use in the official names of many institutions and businesses in Indian Country.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The various Nations, tribes, and bands of Indigenous peoples of the Americas have differing preferences in terminology for themselves. While there are regional and generational variations in which umbrella terms are preferred for Indigenous peoples as a whole, in general, most Indigenous peoples prefer to be identified by the name of their specific Nation, tribe, or band.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Early settlers often adopted terms that some tribes used for each other, not realizing these were derogatory terms used by enemies. When discussing broader subsets of peoples, naming has often been based on shared language, region, or historical relationship. Many English exonyms have been used to refer to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Some of these names were based on foreign-language terms used by earlier explorers and colonists, while others resulted from the colonists' attempts to translate or transliterate endonyms from the native languages. Other terms arose during periods of conflict between the colonists and Indigenous peoples.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Since the late 20th century, Indigenous peoples in the Americas have been more vocal about how they want to be addressed, pushing to suppress use of terms widely considered to be obsolete, inaccurate, or racist. During the latter half of the 20th century and the rise of the Indian rights movement, the United States government responded by proposing the use of the term "Native American", to recognize the primacy of Indigenous peoples' tenure in the nation. As may be expected among people of over 400 different cultures in the US alone, not all of the people intended to be described by this term have agreed on its use or adopted it. No single group naming convention has been accepted by all Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Most prefer to be addressed as people of their tribe or nations when not speaking about Native Americans/American Indians as a whole.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Since the 1970s, "Indigenous" (capitalized when referring to people) has gradually emerged as a favored umbrella term. The capitalization is to acknowledge that Indigenous peoples have cultures and societies that are equal to Europeans, Africans, and Asians. This has recently been acknowledged in the AP Stylebook. Some consider it improper to refer to Indigenous people as "Indigenous Americans" or to append any colonial nationality to the term because Indigenous cultures have existed prior to European colonization. Indigenous groups have territorial claims that are different from modern national and international borders, and when labelled as part of a country, their traditional lands are not acknowledged. Some who have written guidelines consider it more appropriate to describe an Indigenous person as "living in" or "of" the Americas, rather than calling them "American"; or to simply call them "Indigenous" without any addition of a colonial state.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Geneticist and professor of anthropology Jennifer Raff (2022) in the book ""A Genetic Chronicle of the First Peoples in the Americas"" summarized that the first people in the Americas diverged from Ancient East Asians about 36,000 years ago and expanded northwards into Siberia, where they encountered and interacted with a different Paleolithic Siberian population (known as Ancient North Eurasians), giving rise to both Paleosiberian peoples and Ancient Native Americans, which later migrated towards the Beringian region, became isolated from other populations, and subsequently populated the Americas.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Pre-Columbian era refers to all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European and African influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original arrival in the Upper Paleolithic to European colonization during the early modern period.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: While technically referring to the era before Christopher Columbus' voyages of 1492 to 1504, in practice the term usually includes the history of Indigenous cultures until Europeans either conquered or significantly influenced them. "Pre-Columbian" is used especially often in the context of discussing the pre-contact Mesoamerican Indigenous societies: Olmec; Toltec; Teotihuacano' Zapotec; Mixtec; Aztec and Maya civilizations; and the complex cultures of the Andes: Inca Empire, Moche culture, Muisca Confederation, and Cañari.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Norte Chico civilization (in present-day Peru) is one of the defining six original civilizations of the world, arising independently around the same time as that of Egypt. Many later pre-Columbian civilizations achieved great complexity, with hallmarks that included permanent or urban settlements, agriculture, engineering, astronomy, trade, civic and monumental architecture, and complex societal hierarchies. Some of these civilizations had long faded by the time of the first significant European and African arrivals (ca. late 15th–early 16th centuries), and are known only through oral history and through archaeological investigations. Others were contemporary with the contact and colonization period, and were documented in historical accounts of the time. A few, such as the Mayan, Olmec, Mixtec, Aztec and Nahua peoples, had their own written languages and records. However, the European colonists of the time worked to eliminate non-Christian beliefs, and burned many pre-Columbian written records. Only a few documents remained hidden and survived, leaving contemporary historians with glimpses of ancient culture and knowledge.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: According to both Indigenous and European accounts and documents, American civilizations before and at the time of European encounter had achieved great complexity and many accomplishments. For instance, the Aztecs built one of the largest cities in the world, Tenochtitlan (the historical site of what would become Mexico City), with an estimated population of 200,000 for the city proper and a population of close to five million for the extended empire. By comparison, the largest European cities in the 16th century were Constantinople and Paris with 300,000 and 200,000 inhabitants respectively. The population in London, Madrid and Rome hardly exceeded 50,000 people. In 1523, right around the time of the Spanish conquest, the entire population in the country of England was just under three million people. This fact speaks to the level of sophistication, agriculture, governmental procedure and rule of law that existed in Tenochtitlan, needed to govern over such a large citizenry. Indigenous civilizations also displayed impressive accomplishments in astronomy and mathematics, including the most accurate calendar in the world. The domestication of maize or corn required thousands of years of selective breeding, and continued cultivation of multiple varieties was done with planning and selection, generally by women.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Inuit, Yupik, Aleut, and Indigenous creation myths tell of a variety of origins of their respective peoples. Some were "always there" or were created by gods or animals, some migrated from a specified compass point, and others came from "across the ocean".


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The European colonization of the Americas fundamentally changed the lives and cultures of the resident Indigenous peoples. Although the exact pre-colonization population-count of the Americas is unknown, scholars estimate that Indigenous populations diminished by between 80% and 90% within the first centuries of European colonization. The majority of these losses are attributed to the introduction of Afro-Eurasian diseases into the Americas. Epidemics ravaged the Americas with diseases such as smallpox, measles, and cholera, which the early colonists brought from Europe.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The spread of infectious diseases was slow initially, as most Europeans were not actively or visibly infected, due to inherited immunity from generations of exposure to these diseases in Europe. This changed when the Europeans began the human trafficking of massive numbers of enslaved Western and Central African people to the Americas. Like Indigenous peoples, these African people, newly exposed to European diseases, lacked any inherited resistances to the diseases of Europe. In 1520 an African who had been infected with smallpox had arrived in Yucatán. By 1558, the disease had spread throughout South America and had arrived at the Plata basin. Colonist violence towards Indigenous peoples accelerated the loss of lives. European colonists perpetrated massacres on the Indigenous peoples and enslaved them. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1894), the North American Indian Wars of the 19th century cost the lives of about 19,000 Europeans and 30,000 Native Americans.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The first Indigenous group encountered by Columbus, the 250,000 Taínos of Hispaniola, represented the dominant culture in the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas. Within thirty years about 70% of the Taínos had died. They had no immunity to European diseases, so outbreaks of measles and smallpox ravaged their population. One such outbreak occurred in a camp of enslaved Africans, where smallpox spread to the nearby Taíno population and reduced their numbers by 50%. Increasing punishment of the Taínos for revolting against forced labor, despite measures put in place by the encomienda, which included religious education and protection from warring tribes, eventually led to the last great Taíno rebellion (1511–1529).


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Following years of mistreatment, the Taínos began to adopt suicidal behaviors, with women aborting or killing their infants and men jumping from cliffs or ingesting untreated cassava, a violent poison. Eventually, a Taíno Cacique named Enriquillo managed to hold out in the Baoruco Mountain Range for thirteen years, causing serious damage to the Spanish, Carib-held plantations and their Indian auxiliaries. Hearing of the seriousness of the revolt,


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Emperor Charles V (also King of Spain) sent captain Francisco Barrionuevo to negotiate a peace treaty with the ever-increasing number of rebels. Two months later, after consultation with the Audencia of Santo Domingo, Enriquillo was offered any part of the island to live in peace.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Laws of Burgos, 1512–1513, were the first codified set of laws governing the behavior of Spanish settlers in America, particularly with regard to Indigenous peoples. The laws forbade the maltreatment of them and endorsed their conversion to Catholicism. The Spanish crown found it difficult to enforce these laws in distant colonies.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the Indigenous peoples. After initial contact with Europeans and Africans, Old World diseases caused the deaths of 90 to 95% of the native population of the New World in the following 150 years. Smallpox killed from one third to half of the native population of Hispaniola in 1518. By killing the Incan ruler Huayna Capac, smallpox caused the Inca Civil War of 1529–1532. Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all ravaged the remains of Inca culture.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Smallpox killed millions of native inhabitants of Mexico. Unintentionally introduced at Veracruz with the arrival of Pánfilo de Narváez on 23 April 1520, smallpox ravaged Mexico in the 1520s, possibly killing over 150,000 in Tenochtitlán (the heartland of the Aztec Empire) alone, and aiding in the victory of Hernán Cortés over the Aztec Empire at Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) in 1521.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: There are many factors as to why Indigenous peoples suffered such immense losses from Afro-Eurasian diseases. Many European diseases, like cow pox, are acquired from domesticated animals that are not indigenous to the Americas. European populations had adapted to these diseases, and built up resistance, over many generations. Many of the European diseases that were brought over to the Americas were diseases, like yellow fever, that were relatively manageable if infected as a child, but were deadly if infected as an adult. Children could often survive the disease, resulting in immunity to the disease for the rest of their lives. But contact with adult populations without this childhood or inherited immunity would result in these diseases proving fatal.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Colonization of the Caribbean led to the destruction of the Arawaks of the Lesser Antilles. Their culture was destroyed by 1650. Only 500 had survived by the year 1550, though the bloodlines continued through to the modern populace. In Amazonia, Indigenous societies weathered, and continue to suffer, centuries of colonization and genocide.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Contact with European diseases such as smallpox and measles killed between 50 and 67 per cent of the Indigenous population of North America in the first hundred years after the arrival of Europeans. Some 90 per cent of the native population near Massachusetts Bay Colony died of smallpox in an epidemic in 1617–1619. In 1633, in Fort Orange (New Netherland), the Native Americans there were exposed to smallpox because of contact with Europeans. As it had done elsewhere, the virus wiped out entire population-groups of Native Americans. It reached Lake Ontario in 1636, and the lands of the Iroquois by 1679. During the 1770s smallpox killed at least 30% of the West Coast Native Americans. The 1775–82 North American smallpox epidemic and the 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic brought devastation and drastic population depletion among the Plains Indians. In 1832 the federal government of the United States established a smallpox vaccination program for Native Americans ("The Indian Vaccination Act of 1832").


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Indigenous peoples in Brazil declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated three million to some 300,000 in 1997.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Spanish Empire and other Europeans re-introduced horses to the Americas. Some of these animals escaped and began to breed and increase their numbers in the wild.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The re-introduction of the horse, extinct in the Americas for over 7500 years, had a profound impact on Indigenous cultures in the Great Plains of North America and in Patagonia in South America. By domesticating horses, some tribes had great success: horses enabled them to expand their territories, exchange more goods with neighboring tribes, and more easily capture game, especially bison.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Indigenous historical trauma (IHT) is the trauma that can accumulate across generations that develops as a result of the historical ramifications of colonization and is linked to mental and physical health hardships and population decline. IHT affects many different people in a multitude of ways because the Indigenous community and their history is diverse.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Many studies (such as Whitbeck et al., 2014; Brockie, 2012; Anastasio et al., 2016; Clark & Winterowd, 2012; Tucker et al., 2016) have evaluated the impact of IHT on health outcomes of Indigenous communities from the United States and Canada. IHT is a difficult term to standardize and measure because of the vast and variable diversity of Indigenous people and their communities. Therefore, it is an arduous task to assign an operational definition and systematically collect data when studying IHT. Many of the studies that incorporate IHT measure it in different ways, making it hard to compile data and review it holistically. This is an important point that provides context for the following studies that attempt to understand the relationship between IHT and potential adverse health impacts.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Some of the methodologies to measure IHT include a "Historical Losses Scale" (HLS), "Historical Losses Associated Symptoms Scale" (HLASS), and residential school ancestry studies. HLS uses a survey format that includes "12 kinds of historical losses," such as loss of language and loss of land and asks participants how often they think about those losses. The HLASS includes 12 emotional reactions and asks participants how they feel when they think about these losses. Lastly, the residential school ancestry studies ask respondents if their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents or "elders from their community" went to a residential school to understand if family or community history in residential schools are associated with negative health outcomes. In a comprehensive review of the research literature, Joseph Gone and colleagues compiled and compared outcomes for studies using these IHT measures relative to health outcomes of Indigenous peoples. The study defined negative health outcomes to include such concepts as anxiety, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, polysubstance abuse, PTSD, depression, binge eating, anger, and sexual abuse.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The connection between IHT and health conditions is complicated because of the difficult nature of measuring IHT, the unknown directionality of IHT and health outcomes, and because the term "Indigenous people" used in the various samples comprises a huge population of individuals with drastically different experiences and histories. That being said, some studies such as Bombay, Matheson, and Anisman (2014), Elias et al. (2012), and Pearce et al. (2008) found that Indigenous respondents with a connection to residential schools have more negative health outcomes (e.g., suicide ideation, suicide attempts, and depression) than those who did not have a connection to residential schools. Additionally, Indigenous respondents with higher HLS and HLASS scores had one or more negative health outcomes. While there many studies that found an association between IHT and adverse health outcomes, scholars continue to suggest that it remains difficult to understand the impact of IHT. IHT needs to be systematically measured. Indigenous people also need to be understood in separated categories based on similar experiences, location, and background as opposed to being categorized as one monolithic group.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: In the course of thousands of years, Indigenous peoples domesticated, bred and cultivated a large array of plant species. These species now constitute between 50% and 60% of all crops in cultivation worldwide. In certain cases, the Indigenous peoples developed entirely new species and strains through artificial selection, as with the domestication and breeding of maize from wild "teosinte" grasses in the valleys of southern Mexico. Numerous such agricultural products retain their native names in the English and Spanish lexicons.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The South American highlands became a center of early agriculture. Genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species suggests that the potato has a single origin in the area of southern Peru, from a species in the "Solanum brevicaule" complex. Over 99% of all modern cultivated potatoes worldwide are descendants of a subspecies Indigenous to south-central Chile, "Solanum tuberosum ssp. tuberosum", where it was cultivated as long as 10,000 years ago. According to Linda Newson, "It is clear that in pre-Columbian times some groups struggled to survive and often suffered food shortages and famines, while others enjoyed a varied and substantial diet."


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Persistent drought around AD 850 coincided with the collapse of Classic Maya civilization, and the famine of One Rabbit (AD 1454) was a major catastrophe in Mexico.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Indigenous peoples of North America began practicing farming approximately 4,000 years ago, late in the Archaic period of North American cultures. Technology had advanced to the point where pottery had started to become common and the small-scale felling of trees had become feasible. Concurrently, the Archaic Indigenous peoples began using fire in a controlled manner. They carried out intentional burning of vegetation to mimic the effects of natural fires that tended to clear forest understories. It made travel easier and facilitated the growth of herbs and berry-producing plants, which were important both for food and for medicines.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: In the Mississippi River valley, Europeans noted that Native Americans managed groves of nut- and fruit-trees not far from villages and towns and their gardens and agricultural fields. They would have used prescribed burning further away, in forest and prairie areas.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Many crops first domesticated by Indigenous peoples are now produced and used globally, most notably maize (or "corn") arguably the most important crop in the world. Other significant crops include cassava; chia; squash (pumpkins, zucchini, marrow, acorn squash, butternut squash); the pinto bean, "Phaseolus" beans including most common beans, tepary beans and lima beans; tomatoes; potatoes; sweet potatoes; avocados; peanuts; cocoa beans (used to make chocolate); vanilla; strawberries; pineapples; peppers (species and varieties of "Capsicum", including bell peppers, jalapeños, paprika and chili peppers); sunflower seeds; rubber; brazilwood; chicle; tobacco; coca; blueberries, cranberries, and some species of cotton.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Studies of contemporary Indigenous environmental management—including of agro-forestry practices among Itza Maya in Guatemala and of hunting and fishing among the Menominee of Wisconsin—suggest that longstanding "sacred values" may represent a summary of sustainable millennial traditions.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Indigenous peoples also domesticated some animals, such as turkeys, llamas, alpacas, guinea-pigs, and Muscovy ducks.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Cultural practices in the Americas seem to have been shared mostly within geographical zones where distinct ethnic groups adopting shared cultural traits, similar technologies, and social organizations. An example of such a cultural area is Mesoamerica, where millennia of coexistence and shared development among the peoples of the region produced a fairly homogeneous culture with complex agricultural and social patterns. Another well-known example is the North American plains where until the 19th century several peoples shared the traits of nomadic hunter-gatherers based primarily on buffalo hunting.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The languages of the North American Indians have been classified into 56 groups or stock tongues, in which the spoken languages of the tribes may be said to centre. In connection with speech, reference may be made to gesture language which was highly developed in parts of this area.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Of equal interest is the picture writing especially well developed among the Chippewas and Delawares.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Beginning in the 1st millennium BCE, pre-Columbian cultures in Mesoamerica developed several Indigenous writing systems (independent of any influence from the writing systems that existed in other parts of the world). The Cascajal Block is perhaps the earliest-known example in the Americas of what may be an extensive written text. The Olmec hieroglyphs tablet has been indirectly dated (from ceramic shards found in the same context) to approximately 900 BCE-which is around the same time that the Olmec occupation of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán began to weaken.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Maya writing system was logosyllabic (a combination of phonetic syllabic symbols and logograms). It is the only pre-Columbian writing system known to have completely represented the spoken language of its community. It has more than a thousand different glyphs, but a few are variations on the same sign or have the same meaning, many appear only rarely or in particular localities, no more than about five hundred were in use in any given time period, and, of those, it seems only about two hundred (including variations) represented a particular phoneme or syllable.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Zapotec writing system, one of the earliest in the Americas, was logographic and presumably syllabic. There are remnants of Zapotec writing in inscriptions on some of the monumental architecture of the period, but so few inscriptions are extant that it is difficult to fully describe the writing system. The oldest example of Zapotec script, dating from around 600 BCE, is on a monument that was discovered in San José Mogote.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Aztec codices (singular "codex") are books that were written by pre-Columbian and colonial-era Aztecs. These codices are some of the best primary sources for descriptions of Aztec culture. The pre-Columbian codices are largely pictorial; they do not contain symbols that represent spoken or written language. By contrast, colonial-era codices contain not only Aztec pictograms, but also writing that uses the Latin alphabet in several languages: Classical Nahuatl, Spanish, and occasionally Latin.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Spanish mendicants in the sixteenth century taught Indigenous scribes in their communities to write their languages using Latin letters, and there are a large number of local-level documents in Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Yucatec Maya from the colonial era, many of which were part of lawsuits and other legal matters. Although Spaniards initially taught Indigenous scribes alphabetic writing, the tradition became self-perpetuating at the local level. The Spanish crown gathered such documentation, and contemporary Spanish translations were made for legal cases. Scholars have translated and analyzed these documents in what is called the New Philology to write histories of Indigenous peoples from Indigenous viewpoints.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Wiigwaasabak, birch bark scrolls on which the Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) people wrote complex geometrical patterns and shapes, can also be considered a form of writing, as can Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Aboriginal syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of abugidas used to write some Indigenous languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and Athabaskan language families.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Indigenous music can vary between cultures, however there are significant commonalities. Traditional music often centers around drumming and singing. Rattles, clapper sticks, and rasps are also popular percussive instruments, both historically and in contemporary cultures. Flutes are made of river-cane, cedar, and other woods. The Apache have a type of fiddle, and fiddles are also found among a number of First Nations and Métis cultures.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The music of the Indigenous peoples of Central Mexico and Central America, like that of the North American cultures, tend to be spiritual ceremonies. It traditionally includes a large variety of percussion and wind instruments such as drums, flutes, sea shells (used as trumpets) and "rain" tubes. No remnants of pre-Columbian stringed instruments were found until archaeologists discovered a jar in Guatemala, attributed to the Maya of the Late Classic Era (600–900 CE); this jar was decorated with imagery depicting a stringed musical instrument which has since been reproduced. This instrument is one of the very few stringed instruments known in the Americas prior to the introduction of European musical instruments; when played, it produces a sound that mimics a jaguar's growl.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Visual arts by Indigenous peoples of the Americas comprise a major category in the world art collection. Contributions include pottery, paintings, jewellery, weavings, sculptures, basketry, , and beadwork. Because too many artists were posing as Native Americans and Alaska Natives in order to profit from the cachet of Indigenous art in the United States, the U.S. passed the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, requiring artists to prove that they are enrolled in a state or federally recognized tribe. To support the ongoing practice of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian arts and cultures in the United States, the Ford Foundation, arts advocates and American Indian tribes created an endowment seed fund and established a national Native Arts and Cultures Foundation in 2007.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: After the entry of the Spaniards, the process of spiritual conquest was favored, among other things, by the liturgical musical service to which the natives, whose musical gifts came to surprise the missionaries, were integrated. The musical gifts of the natives were of such magnitude that they soon learned the rules of counterpoint and polyphony and even the virtuous handling of the instruments. This helped to ensure that it was not necessary to bring more musicians from Spain, which significantly annoyed the clergy.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The solution that was proposed was not to employ but a certain number of indigenous people in the musical service, not to teach them counterpoint, not to allow them to play certain instruments (brass breaths, for example, in Oaxaca, Mexico) and, finally, not to import more instruments so that the indigenous people would not have access to them. The latter was not an obstacle to the musical enjoyment of the natives, who experienced the making of instruments, particularly rubbed strings (violins and double basses) or plucked (third). It is there where we can find the origin of what is now called traditional music whose instruments they have their own tuning and a typical western structure.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The following table provides estimates for each country in the Americas of the populations of Indigenous people and those with partial Indigenous ancestry, each expressed as a percentage of the overall population. The total percentage obtained by adding both of these categories is also given.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: "Note:" these categories are inconsistently defined and measured differently from country to country. Some figures are based on the results of population-wide genetic surveys while others are based on self-identification or observational estimation.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Indigenous peoples in Canada comprise the First Nations, Inuit and Métis; the descriptors "Indian" and "Eskimo" are falling into disuse. In Canada, it is quite frowned upon to use the name "Indian" in casual conversation. "Eskimo" is considered derogatory in many other places because it was given by non-Inuit and was said to mean "eater of raw meat".


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Hundreds of Indigenous nations evolved trade, spiritual and social hierarchies. The Métis ethnicity developed a culture during the 18th century after generations of First Nations married European settlers. They were small farmers, hunters and trappers, and usually Catholic and French-speaking. The Inuit had more limited interaction with European settlers during that early period. Various laws, treaties, and legislation have been enacted between European-Canadians and First Nations across Canada. Aboriginal Right to Self-Government provides the opportunity for First Nations to manage their own historical, cultural, political, health care and economic control within their communities.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Although not without conflict, early European interactions in the east with First Nations and Inuit populations were relatively peaceful compared to the later experience of Indigenous peoples in the United States. Combined with a late economic development in many regions, this relatively peaceful history resulted in Indigenous peoples having a fairly strong influence on the early national culture, while preserving their own identity. From the late 18th century, European Canadians (primarily British Canadians and French Canadians) worked to force Indigenous peoples to assimilate into the mainstream European-influenced culture, which they referred to as Canadian culture. The government attempted violent forced integration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Notable examples here include residential schools.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: National Indigenous Peoples Day recognizes the cultures and contributions of Indigenous peoples of Canada. There are currently over 600 recognized First Nations governments or bands encompassing 1,807,250 people spread across Canada, with distinctive Indigenous cultures, languages, art, and music.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Greenlandic Inuit (Kalaallisut: "kalaallit", Tunumiisut: "tunumiit", Inuktun: "inughuit") are the Indigenous and most populous ethnic group in Greenland. This means that Denmark has one officially recognized Indigenous group. the Inuit – the Greenlandic Inuit of Greenland and the Greenlandic people in Denmark (Inuit residing in Denmark).


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Approximately 89 percent of Greenland's population of 57,695 is Greenlandic Inuit, or 51,349 people . Ethnographically, they consist of three major groups:


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The territory of modern-day Mexico was home to numerous Indigenous civilizations prior to the arrival of the Spanish "conquistadores": The Olmecs, who flourished from between 1200 BCE to about 400 BCE in the coastal regions of the Gulf of Mexico; the Zapotecs and the Mixtecs, who held sway in the mountains of Oaxaca and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; the Maya in the Yucatán (and into neighbouring areas of contemporary Central America); the Purépecha in present-day Michoacán and surrounding areas, and the Aztecs/Mexica, who, from their central capital at Tenochtitlan, dominated much of the centre and south of the country (and the non-Aztec inhabitants of those areas) when Hernán Cortés first landed at Veracruz.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: In contrast to what was the general rule in the rest of North America, the history of the colony of New Spain was one of racial intermingling ("mestizaje"). "Mestizos", which in Mexico designate people who do not identify culturally with any Indigenous grouping, quickly came to account for a majority of the colony's population. Today, Mestizos in Mexico of mixed indigenous and European ancestry (with a minor African contribution) are still a majority of the population. Genetic studies vary over whether indigenous or European ancestry predominates in the Mexican Mestizo population. In the 2015 census, 20.3% of the Mexican population self-identified as indigenous. In the 2020 INEGI (National Institute of Statistics and Geography) census showed that at the national level there are 11.8 million indigenous people (9.3% of the Mexican population). In 2020 the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples reported 11.1 million people in Mexico belonging to an indigenous ethnicity (8.8% of the Mexican population). The indigenous population is distributed throughout the territory of Mexico, but is especially concentrated in the Sierra Madre del Sur, the Yucatán Peninsula and in the most remote and difficult-to-access areas, such as the Sierra Madre Oriental, the Sierra Madre Occidental and neighboring areas. The CDI identifies 62 Indigenous groups in Mexico, each with a unique language.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: In the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca and in the interior of the Yucatán Peninsula a large amount of the population is Indigenous descent with the largest ethnic group being mayan with a population of 900,000. Large Indigenous minorities, including Aztecs or Nahua, Purépechas, Mazahua, Otomi, and Mixtecs are also present in the central regions of Mexico. In the Northern and Bajio regions of Mexico, Indigenous people are a small minority.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The General Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples grants all Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, regardless of the number of speakers, the same validity as Spanish in all territories in which they are spoken, and Indigenous peoples are entitled to request some public services and documents in their native languages. Along with Spanish, the law has granted them—more than 60 languages—the status of "national languages". The law includes all Indigenous languages of the Americas regardless of origin; that is, it includes the Indigenous languages of ethnic groups non-native to the territory. The National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples recognizes the language of the Kickapoo, who immigrated from the United States, and recognizes the languages of the Indigenous refugees from Guatemala. The Mexican government has promoted and established bilingual primary and secondary education in some Indigenous rural communities. Nonetheless, of the Indigenous peoples in Mexico, 93% are either a native speaker or a bilingual second language speaker of Spanish with only about 62.4% of them (or 5.4% of the country's population) speak an Indigenous language and about a sixth do not speak Spanish (0.7% of the country's population).


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The Indigenous peoples in Mexico have the right of free determination under the second article of the constitution. According to this article the Indigenous peoples are granted:


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Indigenous peoples in what is now the contiguous United States, including their descendants, were commonly called American Indians, or simply Indians domestically and since the late 20th century the term Native American came into common use. In Alaska, Indigenous peoples belong to 11 cultures with 11 languages. These include the St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Iñupiat, Athabaskan, Yup'ik, Cup'ik, Unangax, Alutiiq, Eyak, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit, and are collectively called Alaska Natives. They include Native American peoples as well as Inuit, who are distinct but occupy areas of the region.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: The United States has authority with Indigenous Polynesian peoples, which include Hawaiians, Marshallese (Micronesian), and Samoan; politically they are classified as Pacific Islander American. They are geographically, genetically, and culturally distinct from Indigenous peoples of the mainland continents of the Americas.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Native Americans in the United States make up 1.1% of the population. In the 2020 census, 3.7 million people identified as Native American and Alaska Native alone. A total of 9.7 million people identified as Native Americans and Alaska Native, either alone or in combination with one or more ethnicity or other races. Tribes have established their own criteria for membership, which are often based on blood quantum, lineal descent, or residency. A minority of Native Americans live in land units called Indian reservations.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Some California and Southwestern tribes, such as the Kumeyaay, Cocopa, Pascua Yaqui, Tohono O'odham and Apache, span both sides of the US–Mexican border. By treaty, Haudenosaunee people have the legal right to freely cross the US–Canada border. Athabascan, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Iñupiat, Blackfeet, Nakota, Cree, Anishinaabe, Huron, Lenape, Mi'kmaq, Penobscot, and Haudenosaunee, among others, live in both Canada and the United States, whose international border cut through their common cultural territory.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Mestizos (mixed European-Indigenous) number about 34% of the population; unmixed Maya make up another 10.6% (Kekchi, Mopan, and Yucatec). The Garifuna, who came to Belize in the 19th century from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, have mixed African, Carib and Arawak ancestry and make up another 6% of the population.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: There are over 114,000 inhabitants of Native American origins, representing 2.4% of the population. Most of them live in secluded reservations, distributed among eight ethnic groups: Quitirrisí (In the Central Valley), Matambú or Chorotega (Guanacaste), Maleku (Northern Alajuela), Bribri (Southern Atlantic), Cabécar (Cordillera de Talamanca), Boruca (Southern Costa Rica) and Ngäbe (Southern Costa Rica long the Panamá border).


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: These native groups are characterized for their work in wood, like masks, drums and other artistic figures, as well as fabrics made of cotton.


title: Indigenous peoples of the Americas

text: Estimates for El Salvador's indigenous population vary. The last time a reported census had an Indigenous ethnic option was in 2007, which estimated that 0.23% of the population identified as Indigenous. Historically, estimates have claimed higher amounts. A 1930 census stated that 5.6% were Indigenous. By the mid-20th century, there may have been as much as 20% (or 400,000) that would qualify as "Indigenous". Another estimate stated that by the late 1980s, 10% of the population was Indigenous, and another 89% was mestizo (or people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry).