Indigenous peoples have been guardians of our global envi-ronment and its medicines for millennia—built on a com-munal view of humanity and its links to the ecosystem. Yet asthe new millennium rolls out, Indigenous peoples are amongthose most marginalized within many nation states, theyhave the worst health indicators, and their knowledge con-tinues to be threatened asthe land and resources they dependon are appropriated, developed, degraded, or destroyed.During the United Nations Decade of the WorldsIndigenous Peoples (1995–2005), one response to theseconcerning trends was increased scholarly and policyattention to fields such as traditional ecological knowledge,indigenous health, traditional medicines, and biopro-specting (Janes, 1999; Berkes et al., 2000; Merson, 2000;Subramanian et al., 2006). Yet at the end of this UN decade,an invited Lancet series offered a sobering reminder of justhow much more needs to be done to improve and promotethe health status of Indigenous people worldwide (seeStephens et al., 2006). A significant obstacle to meeting thischallenge has been the predictable tendency to study andanalyze indigenous perspectives and priorities along tradi-tional disciplinary lines, in effect disaggregating holisticunderstanding into academic or thematic silos with mini-mal interaction and a disconnect from pressing, intercon-nected realities of health, culture, and ecology.This edition of EcoHealth has been put together withexplicit interest in (re)integrating indigenous perspectiveson ecosystem sustainability and health. It is timely that theissue was finalized the same week that the United NationsGeneral Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights ofIndigenous People, after almost 13 years since the draftdeclaration was proposed in 1994 (United Nations, 2007).The nonbinding declaration passed despite objections fromAustralia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States,who cited inconsistencies with existing national laws.The controversies and lengthy negotiations to pass theUnited Nations Declaration on the Rights of IndigenousPeoples exemplify the challenges of diversity and contextwhich characterize indigenous issues and demand ongoingattention. The notion of indigeneity is complex and highlycontested. The term Indigenous is used in some contexts torefer to the aboriginal population of a nation or area—-those who were the first-recorded human inhabitants. InAustralasia, North America, and to a large extent LatinAmerica, this interpretation is clearer, drawing a distinctionbetween native peoples and European colonial settlers. Inother areas, including Asia and the Middle East, distinc-tions are less clear. Colonization took place between ethnicgroups within and between countries, and in some casesnative populations were almost entirely eradicated. In othercontexts, social hierarchies such as the Indian caste systemestablish categories of social position at birth, with somegroups recognized as Indigenous or tribal on a sociocul-