indigenous cultures
First Nations traditions
Indigenous cultures are the traditions, practices, beliefs, and social systems of peoples who inhabited a region before colonization or settlement by outside groups.
The phrase typically appears in discussions of preservation, rights, or historical displacement: The museum consulted with indigenous cultures before displaying sacred objects.
Unlike "indigenous peoples," which emphasizes the human communities themselves, indigenous cultures focuses on their distinct ways of life—languages, spiritual practices, governance systems, and relationships to ancestral lands.
- kinship tiesBonds linking relatives together
- storytellingRecounting events aloud
- creation storiesAccounts of existence's origin
- folkloreInherited cultural narratives
- animismSpirits inhabit all things
beadwork · tribal councils · talking circles · colonial history · ceremonies · dreamtime · sacred sites · ancestral lands · oral traditions · elders · repatriation · cosmology · spirit animals · rituals · potlatch · herbal medicine · two-spirit · medicine wheel
- culturemusic taste, beliefs, food preferences, custom, festivals
- cultural historyart history, music history, social history, collective memory, literary history
- Latin AmericaArgentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Cuba
- South PacificFiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, Polynesia
- anthropologyanthropology, fieldwork, ethnography, social anthropology, paleoanthropology
- Indigenous cultureancestors, ancestry, ancestral lands, ancestral lineage, animal totems
indigenous culturesWestern culture
European-originating civilization heritage