ABSTRACT
Over the past 20 years, the international movement of indigenous peoples has grown with extraordinary speed. In 1977, when the nongovernmental organization (NCO) conference on this issue was convened at the United Nations Office in Geneva, governments generally assumed that the term 'indigenous' referred to the original inhabitants of North and South America. Today, grassroots organizations in more than 40 countries participate in United Nations activities in this field, and estimates of the number of indigenous peoples worldwide have been revised upwards from 40 million to nearly 350 million.
