This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Colonial Groupings gathers six peoples classified together by outside labels their own history did not choose, drawn by nineteenth and twentieth century explorers and anthropologists rather than by the peoples they describe.
Melanesian Peoples and Micronesian Peoples both descend from Jules Dumont d'Urville's 1832 division of the Pacific into Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, a scheme later scholarship has rejected outright even as the names persist in ordinary use. Melanesian was separated by the appearance of its inhabitants, the more overtly racial of the two criteria, while Micronesian was defined by island size, though navigation traditions including the Marshall Islands stick charts and Caroline Islands wayfinding are among the strongest threads it actually covers.
Plains Indians is the standard example of the same pattern applied within North America: one of the culture areas anthropology drew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, grouping nations by environment and economy rather than by descent or by any claim of their own, a grouping that went on to shape how its members were governed and displayed. Plateau Peoples, the indigenous nations of the Columbia Plateau including the Wanapum, Yakama, Nez Perce and Umatilla, were similarly grouped by region, though their shared prophetic religious movements, Smohalla's Washani or Dreamer religion among them, spread influence well beyond the Plateau itself.
Moche Culture and Chachapoya are archaeological rather than living categories: both are modern labels for Peruvian peoples with no deciphered writing, the Moche name taken from a river near Trujillo, and Chachapoya cosmology survives only through evidence Inca and then Spanish conquest had already reshaped before any chronicler recorded it.