Indigenous Affairs 3-4/08: Editorial - IWGIA 40 years on

At the 38th International Congress of Americanists, held in Stuttgart, Germany in 1968, a number of anthropologists presented alarming reports of atrocities being carried out against indigenous peoples in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Brazil. In a post-conference meeting just outside Copenhagen, in the home of Helge Kleivan, a Danish anthropologist, fellow anthropologists Milton R. Freeman, Lars Persson and Georg Henriksen met to discuss the obligation anthropologists were under to respond to such human rights abuses. On August 22, 1968 they decided to set up the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs with the explicit purpose of informing the international community on the plight of indigenous peoples.