History of World Indigenous People's Day

The International Day of the World's Indigenous People is celebrated every year on August 9. It commemorates the first meeting of the U.N.

Commission on Human Rights Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1982. In 2004 the General Assembly proclaimed an International Decade.

The goal of this Decade is to further strengthen international cooperation for the solution of problems faced by indigenous people in such areas as culture, education, health, human rights, the environment, and social and economic development.Indigenous peoples number over 300 million and represent approximately 4% of the world's population.

Although they are each unique, they are similar in the sense they share common experiences, including histories of marginalization and struggles for cultural survival. Even to this day any indigenous people are threatened due to the developmental processes such as foraging of hardwoods in the tropical forests of the Amazon , oil-drilling in Ecuador, construction of hydro-electric dams and power stations in India, military test sites and bases in the United States and even the creation of national parks in southern Africa that prohibit land use by humans.

These issues have highly adverse effects on indigenous people in the areas concerned. For these reasons more and more indigenous communities are now getting together locally as well as globally to claim their rights to autonomy, self-determination and cultural identity.