According to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the Fourth World, the Fourth World represents indigenous populations comprising existing descendants of the peoples who inhabited the present territory of a country, wholly or partially, at the time when persons of a different culture, or ethnic origin, arrived there from other parts of the world, overcame them, and, by conquest, settlement, or other means, reduced them to a nondominant or colonial situation.

Three fundamentals are at the heart of any exhaustive understanding of the idea of the Fourth World. The first is the immediate recognition of the plurality of the paradigms that now underline the term. Second is the agreement among observers on its earliest use by George Manuel, a Shuswap chief from Canada. ...