In the past few decades the term indigenous has become internationalized and strategically used. Indigeneity can be conceptualized as a social construct, and, as such, its definitions are contingent and politically and historically contextualized. For example, genomic indigeneity, the perspective favored by most molecular anthropologists, emphasizes a common human genetic ancestry and a history of migrations. As such, an indigenous population becomes a biologically based category (TallBear 2013). In juxtaposition, according to TallBear (2013), indigenous articulations of indigeneity are grounded in political status and biological and cultural kinship “constituted in dynamic, long-standing relations with each other and with living landscapes' ' (p. 510). In an interrelated sense, Merlan (2009) proposes that the term indigenous has become a geocultural category that is grounded in a sense of unity among groups collectively called “indigenous peoples.” This sense of globalized indigeneity, shaped often by political pressures and realities, is patent in institutions such as the United Nations and has been used as the basis for various activist movements. More local meanings, however, may have stronger implications for the production of health in different contexts because they influence power relationships and access to material resources. In all, there seems to be consensus that there is no universally agreed on definition of indigeneity. Two definitional frameworks for indigeneity can be distinguished: relational and criterial definitions. Relational definitions highlight the relations between “indigenous” and their “others,” whereas criterial definitions are grounded in “properties inherent only to those we call ‘indigenous’ themselves” (Merlan 2009, p. 305). That is, indigeneity is not defined by essential properties of its own but instead in relation to what is not considered indigenous (de la Cadena & Starn 2007). For example, words such as ``Aborigine in Australia “were European inventions for people already there, prior to the arrival of the colonizers' ' (de la Cadena & Starn 2007, p. 4). For mainly heuristic purposes, we follow criterial definitions such as the one provided by Jose Martinez Cobo for the ´ United Nations (Martinez Cobo 1981, p. 10), who defined indigenous communities, peoples, and nations as “those which have a historical continuity with pre invasion and pre colonial societies that develop on their territories, consider themselves as distinct from other sectors of societies now prevailing in those territories...and are determined to preserve and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories.” However, when it comes to analyzing the health gaps between indigenous and nonindigenous populations, relational definitions offer a more nuanced, more pertinent framework because they refer to the complex dynamics between indigenous groups and hegemonic powers and the socioeconomic disparities these power differentials promote