A papal bull is a particular type of letters patent or charter issued by a Pope of the Catholic Church. It is named after the bulla that was appended to the end in order to authenticate it.

Papal bulls were originally issued by the pope for many kinds of communication of a public nature, but after the fifteenth century, only for the most formal or solemn of occasions. Modern scholars have retroactively used the term "Bull" to describe any elaborate papal document issued in the form of a decree or privilege (solemn or simple), and to some less elaborate ones issued in the form of a letter. Popularly, the name is used for any papal document that contains a metal seal.^{[citation needed]}

Papal bulls have been in use at least since the sixth century, but the term was not first used until around the middle of the thirteenth century and then only for internal un-official papal record keeping purposes; the term had become official by the fifteenth century, when one of the offices of the Papal chancery was named the "register of bulls" (registrum bullarum).

Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as "indigenous" according to one of the various definitions of the term, though there is no universally accepted definition.

In the late twentieth century, the term began to be used primarily to refer to ethnic groups that have historical ties to groups that existed in a territory prior to colonization or formation of a nation state, and which normally preserve a degree of cultural and political separation from the mainstream culture and political system of the nation state within the border of which the indigenous group is located. The political sense of the term defines these groups as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and oppression by nation states. As a result, a special set of political rights in accordance with international law have been set forth by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. The United Nations have issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to protect the collective rights of indigenous peoples to their culture, identity, language, employment, health, education and natural resources. Depending on which precise definition of "indigenous people" used, and on the census, estimates of a world total population of Indigenous people range from 220 million Indigenous peoples in 1997 to 350 million in 2004.