About
How this list is made.
Indigenous nations today names one nation at a time, as the nation names itself, with checked facts and the source of each one.
The method
Each entry starts from the nation's own name, taken from the nation's own site where one exists, otherwise from a national registry, a representative body or another published source. Every fact is written in our own words from a published page, and carries the page's publisher, a link to it, and a short phrase copied from it that supports the fact. A fact without a supporting phrase is not published.
Sources come in order: the nation's own pages first, then governments, national registries and statistics offices, then UN bodies and international organizations, then museums, universities and research. Wikipedia is never cited.
The checking tool
A tool named ZOTHEOS-nations-verifier/1 (+https://zotheos.org) re-reads every cited page each week. It says who it is, obeys each site's robots.txt, sends at most one request to a site every three seconds and never pretends to be a browser. If the phrase is gone, the fact is hidden until a person restores it. If a site refuses the tool, a person checks the page by hand, and the fact then says so. The full record is on the verification page.
The rotation
The ring is seeded by the date, the same for everyone. The walk is seeded by a key kept only in your browser. Each day, fifteen nations, one from each region, form the ring; after that each device walks on alone and does not repeat a nation within a region until the region is exhausted.
AI assistance
Drafts use published sources and AI assistance. Automated evidence checks and separate source reviews have different roles. AI-assisted reviews are not person checks; any person check needs its own dated receipt.
No requests to other sites
Open your browser's network panel on any page here: every request goes to zotheos.org. There are no analytics, no embeds, no outside fonts and no images from other sites. Sources open only when you follow them.
Typefaces
Some names appear in a second typeface because the brand face lacks their letters. The letters are never changed. Fonts: Instrument Serif, DM Sans and JetBrains Mono, with Tinos, Noto Sans, Cousine, Noto Sans Cherokee, Noto Sans Canadian Aboriginal, Noto Sans Devanagari and Noto Sans Tifinagh for letters the brand faces lack. All self-hosted under the SIL Open Font License. No letter in a name is ever changed to fit a font.
The scale of the task
The United Nations estimates 476 million Indigenous people living in 90 countries, who represent about 5,000 different cultures (United Nations, International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, background (opens in a new tab), read 8 Oct 2026). The World Bank gives 476.6 million, 6.2 percent of the world's people (World Bank, Indigenous Peoples (opens in a new tab), read 8 Oct 2026), while the same UN page says less than 5 per cent. The sources differ, and both are shown.
This list holds 457 nations. It is a beginning, and the coverage page says where it is thin.
Who advises this list
We are not yet advised by an Indigenous advisory circle. Until that circle exists, the rules on this site apply, and this page says so.
Type sample
Every script in use, one line per face, for checking on real hardware after each build.