On August 9, we honor International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a day chosen in recognition of the first meeting of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations held in Geneva in 1982.
According to the UN, “There are an estimated 476 million indigenous peoples in the world living across 90 countries. They make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but account for 15 percent of the poorest. They speak an overwhelming majority of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages and represent 5,000 different cultures. Indigenous peoples are inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment…We need indigenous communities for a better world.”