Descended from Tibetan migrants, the Ngalop of western Bhutan gave the kingdom its language, its Drukpa faith, its dzongs, and the national dress that became the face of the Thunder Dragon.

In the far northeast of China, hard against the border with Korea, lives a community of ethnic Koreans who crossed the river within living memory and kept the language, food and fierce pride of a homeland just across the water.

Across the canyon country of the American Southwest live the Navajo, or Diné, the largest Indigenous nation in the United States, whose language, weaving and ceremony remain vigorously alive today.

Bulgaria gave the Slavic world its written culture, rose to imperial glory, then endured the longest subjugation in Europe, surviving five centuries through faith and language alone.

The Quechua are the largest indigenous nation in the Americas, heirs to the Inca Empire, still farming, weaving, and speaking Runasimi across the high Andes today.

The Maya built one of the great civilizations of the ancient Americas, and millions of their descendants still speak Maya languages and keep Maya tradition alive across Mexico and Central America today.

High under a glacier in northwest Yunnan live the Naxi, a small people who kept the last living picture-script on earth, rescued forgotten music, and built a town of running water at the foot of a sacred mountain.

The great Iranian people of Central Asia, the Tajiks speak a form of Persian and are heirs to the Samanid golden age, the poetry of Rudaki, and the high valleys of the Pamirs.

The Cherokee built towns, a written constitution, and their own syllabary before being forced along the Trail of Tears, and today lead one of the largest and most prosperous tribal nations in the United States.

The story of the Nenets, the greatest of the reindeer-herding peoples of the Russian Arctic: a Samoyedic people of the open tundra, keepers of one of the last great nomadic traditions on earth, their reindeer, their hide tents, their shamanism, and their struggle to survive in an age of gas and industry.