In Guyana, there have been two labels for the peoples whom Columbus stumbled upon when he sailed across from Spain in 1492. Initially, they were called “Amerindians”, in deference to Columbus’s mistakenly believing he had reached India. Then, in the 1970s, there was the movement to define them as “indigenous”.
Today, one author in the February edition of the New Yorker believes “It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the “Indigenous”. He writes: “Today, nearly half a billion people qualify as “Indigenous””. If they were a single country, it would be the world’s third most populous, behind China and India. Exactly who counts as Indigenous, however, is far from clear. Initially, there was the idea of being “first”, but this proved nettlesome. In place of “firstness”, a U.N. fact sheet lists self-identification as the key criterion. This doesn’t quite work, either. If it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the Indigenous to be indigenous, what fills the conceptual space?
A natural candidate, worryingly, is primitiveness. As several recent books show, centuries of colonialism have entangled indigeneity with outdated images of simple, timeless peoples unsullied by history.
The conflation of indigeneity with primitiveness can be stifling. Indigenous intellectuals write about the pressure to adopt identities that are “primordial,” “naturalistic,” and “unchanging.” Fail to do so, they say, and you risk looking inauthentic. Rather than being harmless, one scholar wrote that such standards make it “impossible for Native peoples to narrate the historical and social complexities of cultural exchange, change, and transformation — to claim cultures and identities that are conflicted, messy, uneven, modern, technological, mixed.”
Indigeneity is powerful. It can give a platform to the oppressed. It can turn local David-vs-Goliath struggles into international campaigns. Yet there’s also something troubling about categorising a wildly diverse array of peoples around the world within a single identity —particularly one born of an ideology of social evolutionism crafted in white settler states and burdened with colonialist baggage. Can the status of “Indigenous” really be globalised without harming the people it is supposed to protect?
To understand the origins of a global Indigenous identity, we need to turn to the activist networks that were formed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. The U.N., in its 2021 report on the “State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples,” determined that eighty-six per cent of them live in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Who’s entitled to the status remains a subject of contention.
Identifying which criteria are at play is tricky, but some anthropologists and social theorists argue that our concept of indigeneity is bound up with outdated ideas about so-called primitive peoples. The tropes persist; we have merely replaced one set of terms with another. Even if you are not aboriginal, you can count as Indigenous if you come across as simple, egalitarian, culturally encapsulated, spiritually attuned to nature, and somehow isolated from history and civilization.
A politics built around indigeneity, many organizers fear, can reify ethnic boundaries. It encourages people to justify why their ethnic group, and not another, deserves particular resources and accommodations. It weakens domestic ties, which are otherwise critical for oppressed minorities.
There is also what the Indian anthropologist Alpa Shah calls a “dark side of indigeneity.” Many of the problems start with image management. To secure their status as Indigenous, Adivasis (as they are called in India) have needed to look tribal and non-modern. Urban activists necessarily endorse images of them as children of the forest. Still, there’s something troubling when advocates and patrons urge their putative beneficiaries to perform Victorian daydreams.
Indigeneity is a project of hope. It was crafted by enterprising activists over years of strategizing, absorbing ideas from Red Power, Third Worldism, African and Asian anti-colonialism, and the environmental movement. With it, people sought a politics of the oppressed, aiming to protect land and sovereignty, to turn “backward” natives into respected stewards. When indigeneity promised to deliver on these goals by attracting the support of international organizations, the natural temptation was to stretch the concept until it covered as many disempowered peoples as possible, even at the cost of coherence.
