By Anne Deruyttere

The answer to this seemingly straightforward question is far from clear, in large measure because of the difficulties in determining who is indigenous and who is not. Is a person’s status determined by ancestry, purity of lineage, adherence to cultural traditions? Or is a person indigenous simply by claiming to be so?

How many indigenous peoples are there in the Americas? Even if reliable census data were available, there is still no universally acceptable answer to the question of who is indigenous. This map represents conservative estimates based on national censuses of varying degrees of accuracy and using different criterias

It is not an idle question. If a government undertakes a health or education program targeted at indigenous peoples, it must decide which communities to include. In a project to demarcate indigenous territories, it must determine who will have rights to these lands.

Over the years, an international consensus on the definition of indigenous peoples has been formed through the preparation of legal instruments by organizations such as the International Labor Organization, the Organization of the American States and the United Nations. These international covenants define indigenous people as the descendants of the original inhabitants of a geographic region prior to colonization who have maintained some or all of their linguistic, cultural and organizational characteristics. An additional criterion is self-identification.

But at the country level, census forms use differing criteria. Many national censuses do not even address the issue, and estimates of indigenous peoples must be based on other information sources.

This said, it can be conservatively estimated that between 33 million and 40 million indigenous peoples live in Latin America and the Caribbean. These are divided into about 400 different ethnic groups, each with a different language, social organization, world-view, economic system and mode of production adapted to the ecosystem they inhabit.

Despite their heterogeneity, indigenous peoples share similar concerns and aspirations that are based on a holistic view of the relation between mankind and the natural environment, and between the individual and the community.
Indigenous peoples live in all the countries of Latin America except Uruguay. Estimates for the Caribbean islands vary between 30,000 and 50,000 people of direct indigenous descent.

Countries with the largest proportion of indigenous peoples are Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru and Ecuador. Estimates for Bolivia range between 50 percent and 70 percent. Although one-quarter of the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples live in Mexico, they represent slightly less than 10 percent of that country’s population. Five countries—Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia and Ecuador—account for nearly 90 percent of indigenous peoples in the region.