Indigenous Nations and Modern States

Indigenous peoples throughout the world tenaciously defend their lands, cultures, and their lives with resilience and determination. They have done so generation after generation. These are peoples who make up bedrock nations throughout the world in whose territories the United Nations says 80 percent of the world’s life sustaining biodiversity remains. Once thought of as remnants of a human past that would soon disappear in the fog of history, indigenous peoples—as we now refer to them—have in