One of Nepal’s most ancient peoples, the Kirat – the Rai and Limbu of the eastern hills – keep an indigenous nature religion, the Mundhum scripture, the Sirijunga script, and the Sakela dance.

Heirs of the world’s oldest cities and keepers of a mystical tradition, the story of the Sindhis: their ancient river homeland, their sweet language, their Sufi saints, crafts, food, and enduring pluralism.

The Assamese of the Brahmaputra valley, their easternmost Indo-Aryan language, the Ahom kingdom that stopped the Mughals, Sankardeva and the satras, the tea industry, Kaziranga, Bihu, and the questions of identity in India’s northeast.

They speak Chinese, look Chinese, and cook some of China’s best-loved dishes, yet they are a people apart. This is the story of the Hui, China’s Muslims, heirs to a thousand-year fusion of two civilizations.

In the tropical lowlands of eastern Bolivia, between the Amazon basin and the dry scrub of the Gran Chaco, live the Chiquitano, one of the largest indigenous peoples of the

On the high, wooded savannas of the southern Congo basin, in the country where Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zambia meet, lives a people whose carved masks

In a rugged corner of southeastern Oaxaca, where the pine forests of the Sierra Sur fall away through steep canyons toward the hot Pacific coast, live a small people whose

In the green borderlands where Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador meet stands the ancient Maya city of Copán, its temples and carved monuments among the finest ever raised in the

High in the mist-wrapped mountains of northwestern Guatemala lives a Maya people whose name is little known beyond Central America yet whose way of life reaches back thousands of years.

Along the sunlit coast of southern California and out to the offshore islands, the Chumash built one of the most sophisticated Native societies of western North America. Theirs was a