The term "Indian" for native North Americans is of course wildly inappropriate, based on a 500-year-old error in geography, but the term is now thoroughly embedded in language and literature. Americans tend to have a provincial viewpoint that "Indians" are limited to the United States, or even to the American West. Those with a broader perspective extend the appelation to native Canadians, Mesoamericans, and South Americans.
Now consider Russia, the ancestral home of the peoples who in prehistoric time migrated to the New World. The picture above comes from a photoset depicting the Itelmen inhabiting the Kamchatka peninsula in northeast Russia. Since the eighteenth century there has been extensive intermarriage with Cossacks, so that the term Kamchadal is now used for the resultant mixed population, but some ethnic Itelmen are making a valiant effort to preserve their culture and language.
Like Native Americans, the aboriginal Itelmen thrived on the immense salmon runs of the North Pacific; their dwellings and religious beliefs also have strong parallels with those of Native Americans. It's not clear whether the dress and adornments exhibited in the photoessay reflect a parallel cultural evolution, or whether the modern Itelmen have back-adapted the trappings of their more well-known North American counterparts.
Link to English Russia photoessay. More info here and here.
Now consider Russia, the ancestral home of the peoples who in prehistoric time migrated to the New World. The picture above comes from a photoset depicting the Itelmen inhabiting the Kamchatka peninsula in northeast Russia. Since the eighteenth century there has been extensive intermarriage with Cossacks, so that the term Kamchadal is now used for the resultant mixed population, but some ethnic Itelmen are making a valiant effort to preserve their culture and language.
Like Native Americans, the aboriginal Itelmen thrived on the immense salmon runs of the North Pacific; their dwellings and religious beliefs also have strong parallels with those of Native Americans. It's not clear whether the dress and adornments exhibited in the photoessay reflect a parallel cultural evolution, or whether the modern Itelmen have back-adapted the trappings of their more well-known North American counterparts.
Link to English Russia photoessay. More info here and here.
Most of us Europeans and Americans do not have a single clue about the cultural and geographical complexity and largeness of the native tribes of the North-American continent and of Syberia. We all are just emerging from a whole time when we only knew that there was us "Civilised" Westerners and that there were them "Primitive" -non-specified because not equal or worthy- Others.
...
http://www.dickshovel.com/Banks.html
"When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met "Indio," from the Italian in dio, meaning "in God.")"
Interesting, eh?
(Disclaimer - I admittedly am taking his word for it w/o a fact check...)