State of the World's Indigenous Peoples: UN Report released Jan 15 2010

Indigenous peoples make up one-third of the world's poorest and suffer alarming conditions in all countries

First UN publication on the state of the world's indigenous peoples reveals alarming statistics on poverty, health, education, employment, human rights, the environment and more.

Indigenous peoples all over the world continue to suffer from disproportionally high rates of poverty, health problems, crime and human rights abuses.

- In the United States, a Native American is 600 times more likely to contract tuberculosis and 62 per cent more likely to commit suicide than the general population.

- In Australia, an indigenous child can expect to die 20 years earlier than his non-native compatriot. The life expectancy gap is also 20 years in Nepal, while in Guatemala it is 13 years and in New Zealand it is 11.

- In parts of Ecuador, indigenous people have 30 times greater risk of throat cancer than the national average.

- And worldwide, more than 50 per cent of indigenous adults suffer from Type 2 diabetes - a number
predicted to rise.

These are just a few of the startling statistics in the United Nations' first publication on the State of the World's Indigenous Peoples, a thorough assessment of how indigenous peoples are faring in areas such as health, poverty, education and human rights.

While indigenous peoples make up around 370 million of the world's population - some 5 per cent - they constitute around one-third of the world's 900 million extremely poor rural people. Every day, indigenous communities all over the world face issues of violence and brutality, continuing assimilation policies, dispossession of land, marginalization, forced removal or relocation, denial of land rights, impacts of large-scale development, abuses by military forces and a host of other abuses.

A recent study, applying UNDP's Human Development Index to indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, showed clearly that indigenous people lag significantly behind the general populations in these countries. This discrepancy is particularly pronounced in Australia, where Australian non-indigenous HDI scores rose steadily in the 1990s but remained stagnant amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

According to the study, the HDI of Australia's indigenous peoples is similar to that of Cape Verde and El Salvador. Although the gap has narrowed in Canada, New Zealand and the United States, there is still a significant HDI gap in all three countries between the indigenous and non-indigenous population. In 2001, Australia ranked third; the United States, seventh; Canada, eighth; and New Zealand, twentieth in the HDI rankings, while U.S. American Indian and Alaska Natives ranked thirtieth; Canadian Aboriginals, thirty-second; New Zealand Maori, seventy-third, and Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, one hundred third. In all four countries, predominantly English-speaking settler cultures have supplanted indigenous peoples to a large extent, leading to enormous indigenous resource losses, "the eventual destruction of indigenous economies and a good deal of social organization, precipitous population declines and subjection to tutelary and assimilationist policies antagonistic to indigenous cultures".