Sacred Name Collection

The third website of the Sacred Name Collection

Indigenous Knowledge of the Americas

What the first peoples of these continents knew, made, wrote, and agreed — gathered from the published record and set down with its sources, people by people. What is being lost while the world looks away. And what was done to them, documented, region by region and period by period.

This site is a history. Every part of it is told in its time — the knowledge in its development, the practices from their antiquity forward, the record period by period — under the standing charge of this Collection: true history, sourced, dated, and labelled.

The Knowledge

The ancient knowledge of each people: their languages, their traditions, the treaties made with them and what those treaties promised, their writings — glyphs, wampum, codices, birchbark, winter counts — and their crafts, arts, and skills, from Three Sisters agriculture to the engineering of the iglu.

The Knowledge

The Practices — Their History

How the peoples did the work of their lives, each practice told as its history: following the buffalo and caribou herds, the farming systems and the harvest, tanning hides, building canoes and snow houses, trading amongst themselves, their wars, their songs and the making of drums and flutes — from each practice's antiquity to its continuance today.

The Practices — Their History

The Extinction Register

Peoples and languages going extinct, and those already gone — named one by one, with the count of who remains and the source and year of every count. Nothing estimated, nothing rounded into existence.

The Extinction Register

The Genocide Record

The documented record for the Americas: the demographic collapse, the massacres, the forced removals, the residential and boarding schools, the enslavement — and the findings that governments and inquiries have themselves placed on record. Compiled research, sourced throughout; never softened, never inflated.

The Genocide Record

How this site is made

The Knowledge — people by people

Every people in the Knowledge stands here. Open a people to read the whole of it.

Every claim carries its source. Documented fact is kept separate from a people's own traditional account, and both are kept separate from claims that remain contested — each is labelled for what it is. Counts, dates, and treaty terms are never invented; where scholars disagree, the range and the disagreement are printed. Knowledge that a people holds sacred or restricted, and has not itself published, is not dug out here — this site records only what is published and public. Entries stand as researched drafts pending cultural review, in the same discipline as the Collection's Indigenous Knowledge Encyclopedia.

This site stands beside the Sacred Name Collection library and the school. The recovered Indigenous language texts themselves — the peoples' own published books, restored as witnesses — live in the library's languages section, where they belong to the Collection's knowledge; this site is their encyclopedia.