Definitions for "Indigenous peoples"
people whose ancestors inhabited a place or country when persons from another culture or ethnic background arrived on the scene and dominated them through conquest, settlement, or other means and who today live more in conformity with their own social, economic, and cultural customs and traditions than with those of the country of which they now form a part.
The people who first lived in North America. Europeans called them 'Indians' at first because they had darker skin and because the Europeans thought that they had reached India.
People who are original or natural inhabitants of a country. Native Americans, for example, are the indigenous peoples of the United States.