Few Indigenous nations reshaped the map of North America as decisively, or as quickly, as the Comanche. Splitting from Shoshone relatives in the Rocky Mountains only a few centuries ago,

Scattered across every country of Europe yet bound by a common story, the Roma are one of the continent’s most distinctive and most misunderstood peoples. A nation without a state,

In the far northern and northwestern borderlands of China lives one of the most surprising of all the country’s recognised peoples: an ethnic Russian minority whose ancestors crossed from the

In the wooded valleys of the Carpathian Mountains, where the borders of Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland meet, and far to the south on the plains of Serbia, live the Rusyns,

From a narrow strip on the Atlantic edge of Europe, the Portuguese launched the age of discovery and linked the continents, a seafaring people of warmth, melancholy, and saudade.

Where the Yellow River makes a great bend through the hills of eastern Qinghai lives a small Muslim people of Turkic root, the Salar. Their forefathers, their cherished legend holds,

In the western Pacific, where tradition says the creator Tagaloa first set the world in order, lies the archipelago many scholars call the cradle of Polynesia. The Samoans have held

In the western Mediterranean, ringed by turquoise seas and centered on a rugged highland heart, live the Sardinians, one of the most ancient and distinctive peoples of Europe. Heirs to

At the northern end of Britain, in a land of mountains, lochs, and windswept isles, live one of Europe’s proudest and most instantly recognisable nations: the Scots. Formed from Picts,

On the desert coast of Sonora, where the Sonoran Desert meets the warm waters of the Gulf of California, live one of the smallest and most singular nations in all