“Plank houses are good houses for people in cold climates with lots of tall trees(...) only people who don't need to migrate spend the time and effort to build these large permanent homes(...) only coastal tribes, who make their living by fishing, made houses like these.”
Iris at Opelucid Academy was ostracized for her "strange" behaviour like splashing around in the fountain or picking fruits from the trees to eat... she also had trouble studying from books, as it seems she mostly learned through an oral tradition in her village from the Old Matriarch/Village Elder before that.
There's a scene in the fishing competition episode where Iris gets very, very bored waiting for a Water type to bite at her lure, so she just pulls up her sleeves, sheds a layer, and quickly and easily catches a Water type Pokemon on her own!
The Pokemon world is a fantasy one, but with analogous regions/countries to our world and the American region we're shown (Unova, largely based on New York, but blended with other aspects of the U.S., too, so we also see the Resort Desert, where in the anime, an abandoned mining town built during the Gold Rush is also shown… which would help explain the reservations....)
Both past (Champion Alder) and current (Champion Iris) Champions are Native--although Iris looks very different from the rest of the people in her village, so she's likely mixed... we'll likely never know because she seems to be a half-wild orphan, all her flashbacks of her life before Opelucid Academy are either among the forest Pokemon, with her childhood friend Shobu/Shannon, or with the Old Village Elder who taught her.
Alder is most obviously inspired by Natives of the Great Plains, who relied heavily on the buffalo (American bison)... unlike how cruelly they were whittled down in number in reality to starve the Natives, they still exist in the wild in great numbers in the Pokemon world, which tends to portray humans working towards a more utopic world, aiming for harmony with nature, having learned from past mistakes and wars
Satoshi Tajiri, after all, made the games to preserve the memory of the lost natural landscape of his youth which was paved over. Environmentalism and love of nature is at the heart of it (even if cynical fake fans see it as overglorified cockfighting because they do not see the trainer-Pokemon bond as more like coaches and athletes, do not see the Pokemon as highly sentient, or do not understand how they are shown in the anime to be very proud and battle for sport, often refusing to be captured unless a trainer first defeats them in battle and shows their strength & worthiness to train them).
As you travel from your idyllic hometown, you see more polluted cities, that create new monsters or alter existing ones through their pollution (Muk, Trubbish, Corsola->Cursola [a happy Water type becoming a sad Ghost type, bleached coral],) some species are hunted/poached to near-extinction (like the gentle Lapras), others were chased out of hospitable land by humans and forced to adapt and likely ultimately failed/went extinct (Zoroark->Hisuian Zoroark)...
As this lovely review by Tama Hero of the Red & Blue games describes: “The game asks you to be curious, learn, grow, & discover: that adults aren’t always right, even in positions of authority; learn how to be better than the adults that raised you; learn from their mistakes and maybe go on to make better decisions as you inherit this ruined earth.”"
Sources:
"The Ultimate Game Freak" TIME Magazine interview with Satoshi Tajiri. https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2040095,00.html
http://native-languages.org/houses.htm
Also: Drawings of Chinook Plankhouse by a Chinook Tribal Councilman. http://publichistorypdx.org/projects/chinook/river-chinook-plankhouse/
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