In the United States, there are approximately 4 million indigenous people, in more than 500 tribes, who self-identify as American Indian or Alaskan Native. Indigenous North Americans are also known as Native Americans, American Indians, Indians, Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians, Aboriginal, and/or First Nations. Each tribe has its own name, and some have several names. For example, the Ojibwe are also called the Chippewa (Struthers, Eschiti, & Patchell, 2004).
The term American Indian today refers to common values and a shared identity among many Native American people and is also the legal title of federally recognized tribes holding jurisdiction on U. S. reservation lands. The term Natives is the term preferred by the indigenous people of Canada and the Six Nations’ People (Iroquois), and it is the term officially used by the Canadian government to identify indigenous people (Voss, Moerman, & Micozzi, 2015).
There were more than 75 million native people in the Western hemisphere, including 12 to 18 million native people living in what is now the United States before the Europeans reduced their numbers to approximately 400,000 by 1900 through well-strategized assaults on their culture, land theft, and the introduction of infectious diseases. They spoke 2,000 languages (Dapice, 2006).
Long before Columbus landed in what he thought was India (Hindustan) in 1492, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were practicing a highly advanced medicine that emphasized “the right way” of things in the cosmos. In “the right way,” human beings were not considered to be superior to plants, animals, and the earth but, instead, were kindred spirits relying on all other forms of life for their very life (Voss, Moerman, & Micozzi, 2015).