In the rugged mountains of eastern Guerrero lives a people whose language stands almost alone in the Americas. Known to the wider world as the Tlapanec, they call themselves Meꞌphaa,

Along Nicaragua and Honduras’s Caribbean shore, the Miskito built an English-allied coastal kingdom that outlasted Spanish colonial rule entirely.

In the cloud wrapped mountains of northeastern Oaxaca, where a great sacred peak rises above a maze of ridges and forests, live a people famous throughout Mexico for a single

Long before Spanish ships reached the Gulf of Mexico, the mountains and valleys of what is now the state of Oaxaca were home to one of Mesoamerica’s most sophisticated Indigenous

High in the Colombian Andes, on a broad, cool plateau that today holds the sprawling capital city of Bogota, a confederation of farming and salt-trading chiefdoms once flourished with enough

In the rivers and woodlands of the American Southeast, the Muscogee built one of the most sophisticated societies of the region, a confederacy of many towns bound together into a

Nahua people form the largest Indigenous population in Mexico today, the linguistic and cultural heirs of a world that produced the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan and dozens of other city-states

Across the forests, lakes, and rivers of the upper Great Lakes and out toward the northern plains live the Ojibwe, known also as the Chippewa and counted among the Anishinaabe,

From Varanasi and the Ganges to the Taj Mahal and Bollywood, the people of the northern plains form the cultural heartland of India.

A people bound by language rather than blood, spread across two dozen countries. The story of the Arabs, the Arabic tongue, the rise of Islam, a golden age of learning, colonialism, oil, and the struggles of today.