ABSTRACT
The controversy surrounding the international movement of indigenous peoples includes not just struggles over land, resources, recognition, and sovereignty but also, perhaps as a prelude to all other contests, the complex, delicate issue of defining the term "indigenous." This is becoming all the more pertinent as the term is increasingly associated with new rights and benefits (especially political power) and as the peoples claiming indigenous status emerge with greater frequency and insistence from Africa and Asia—in other words, from hemispheres that differ from the Americas in terms of the complexities of historical settlement, colonialism, and, above all, the development of various authoritarian state systems that resulted from national liberation of former European colonies in the mid- to late twentieth century. How do people from within these diverse social and historical contexts fit into a widening rubric of "indigenous peoples"?
