Fascinating article by Manvir Singh in the February 27 New Yorker on the creation and evolution of the worldwide movement for the rights of "indigenous" peoples. The term emerged from North America, where it described the difference between Native Americans and people of European or African descent. That was the original model: people who have been where they are for a long time, who are governed and culturally dominated by people who came a lot more recently. It spread from there to the Maori of New Zealand, who had a similar political and cultural situation. But in Polynesia complications started to emerge.
For one thing, Native Americans claimed to be indigenous on the basis of very long residence in the land. But the Maori arrived in New Zealand around 1250 AD. That's 250 years after the Norse arrived in Iceland, and nobody thinks of the Icelanders as indigenous. No, the Scandinavian people classed as "indigenous" by the UN are the reindeer-herding Sami, who were comparative latecomers to a region long inhabited by a mix of hunter gatherers and farmers. Some activists recognized the problems that would arise if this concept was applied in Asia or Africa, but they were ignored, and the word is now embraced by people across the globe. One of the groups that has made a great deal of noise about being indigenous is the Masai of East Africa, who according to both their own oral history and modern anthropology arrived from the north no more than 300 years ago, long after some of the groups that politically dominate Kenya and Tanzania.
So long residence is neither necessary nor sufficient to make anyone indigenous. Instead the concept has generally been applied to groups that are, compared to their neighbors, technologically more primitive and politically less empowered. But that of course creates its own problems. If being indigenous means being primitive, poor, and oppressed, might one say that it is a curse to be avoided, not an identity to be embraced? And so many people have said. One Native American elder interviewed by Singh said he knew "indigenous" only "as a word of discrimination," implying that his people were "savage, like wild animals."
On the other side, some groups have embraced being indigenous who are not the least primitive or oppressed. For example, some Indian Hindus have decided that they are indigenous, the "original" inhabitants of India who deserve "special status and rights", the words used by the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations. The same thing has happened in Samoa, where the Polynesian people dominate the islands demographically and politically but still insist on participating in global indigenous conferences and the like.
Singh doesn't even get into the question that my readers know fascinates me: how long has anybody been anywhere? Singh describes a UN video on indigenous peoples that begins, "They were always here — the original inhabitants." I get it that the word "always" is used all the time to simply mean "for quite a while," or maybe "for longer than I feel like thinking about." But nobody has always been anywhere. Some people have been in some places at least two thousand years, and that seems to me long enough to claim a status as natives. But how long does it take? If 800 years is enough to make the Maori natives of New Zealand, is 350 years long enough to make the Bedells natives of New York? After all, that may be longer than the Masai have been in East Africa. Who gets to decide how long is enough?
And, what is a "people"? There are tribal groups in India that have been granted a special status by the Indian government, but anthropologists think some of them are no more than 300 years old; also, they seem to be genetically identical to the farmers who live nearby. The Irish government has recognized the Mincéirs or Irish Travellers as an indigenous ethnic group, but they are genetically identical to everyone else in Ireland, just folks who took up living in wagons around 200 years ago. In Central and South America most people have a lot of Indian blood, and many maintain some Indian traditions. In some parts of Mexico, for example Oaxaca, the Indian blood is thicker and the customs stronger. Does that make them indigenous? Or just Mexican?
After reading Singh's essay I am left thinking that "indigenous" is essentially a word for those who decline to embrace the modern world. That comes at a high cost. Over the past few centuries, modernity has given those who embrace it wealth and power far beyond what any traditional people could achieve. If that's their choice, so be it; but to me it seems cruel to tell your children that they can only enter the amazing world of modernity by giving up who they are. Modern civilization is no longer "western", something alien to most of the world; on the contrary people across the world have embraced it, and the people of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and India are now among its leading practitioners. I do not think it is "un-Japanese" to live in the modern way, so I don't see why it would be un-Navajo or un-Masai to do so.
I think people should live how they want, and part of me is deeply offended by the notion that how people can live should be limited by where they happen to be born. That makes me, I know, a thorough-going modernist. It also makes me suspicious of the indigenous movement. If people want to live where they were born, in the way that their parents and grandparents lived, that's fine by me. But I am not at all sure that makes them any more special than anyone else, or gives them rights that anyone else doesn't also have.
8 comments:
I wonder if this is a rare case where the original etymology might be useful to consider.
The Latin 'indigena', 'indu' + 'gignere'; quite literally, begotten in a place. Obviously we don't apply this literally when it comes to individuals, but I feel like it's much more feasible to apply it to peoples / cultures / societies.
I think what makes a culture indigenous to a place is the degree to which the culture itself is a product of the place. Like most things in this complex world of ours, it's not really appropriate to treat it as a binary - rather, I feel it works better as a scale.
So for example, Norse culture clearly was not indigenous to Northern France - it originated elsewhere and was only transplanted there by the invading Norse vikings. But on the other hand, you could very well argue that subsequent Norman culture was indigenous to Northern France, because it came into being there and was a product of that place, inextricable from it.
Are the Māori indigenous to New Zealand? I would argue, yes, absolutely. Some will point to the fact that the Māori only arrived in New Zealand in the 1300s and argue that this means they originated elsewhere. But while this is true, I would respond by noting that the people who first arrived in New Zealand were not yet Māori - they were still Polynesians. They would only become Māori over subsequent generations and centuries spent in isolation, with their language and culture diverging from that of their Polynesian ancestors.
Māori culture is intrinsically defined by it's existence within New Zealand. Their unique myths and legends are about, and shaped by, the land in which they live - even while they also revere their ancestral origins from elsewhere as a defining feature of their people. They quite naturally borrow themes, figures, etc, retained from earlier Polynesian lore, but the very differences that make Māori culture distinct are all the product of living in Aotearoa, and not anywhere else. How could that be anything BUT indigenous?
The same thinking also resolves your other examples - tribal groups in India being only a few centuries old doesn't change the fact that they are clearly indigenous, having been a direct product of the land in which they came to be; and Irish Travelers are, of course, indigenous to Ireland, even if they differ from their fellow (also indigenous) Irish brethren.
You mention Oaxacans, and ask if they are indigenous when other Mexicans with less thick Indian blood and weaker customs are not. I again posit that a binary view is inherently flawed - it's not that Oaxacans are indigneous and certain others are not; it's that Oaxacan genetics and Oaxacan culture are both more indigenous than others.
How could they not be? If you have more foreign-originating genes than your neighbor, then you are clearly genetically less indigenous than they are; and if you practice more foreign-originating customs and cultural aspects than your neighbor, then you are clearly culturally less indigenous as well.
(The caveat, of course, being that this only applies within very specific contexts tied to given locations; and that it probably doesn't actually matter, and thus shouldn't be used as a major basis for granting people special rights denied to others. "Indigenous" status as per the UN guidelines is clearly a deeply flawed concept, as it stands. It might be less so if it wasn't treated as some kind of binary, but then that would also render it largely useless for the purpose of politics and policy, so...)
Personally, I think special rights or status should be granted on basis of merit / victimhood, rather than on whether (or to what degree) something is "indigenous" to a place. Because to some extent, virtually everything eventually becomes indigenous to a place the more time passes and the more a culture or way of thinking evolves within the context of a place.
I think G. makes an excellent point about place. In addition, I would suggest that in many cases claims of indigenous status are a useful tool to hold back modernity, one of whose more obnoxious qualities is that it gives aggressive, hard-driving types the ability to do things like excavate giant mines in Papua or burn down rain forest to create beef ranches, and do those and similar things very rapidly. Anything that slows that down is fine by me. I recognize there's a lot of weaknesses in my argument, such as my own hypocritical participation in modern consumerism and comfort; the fact that development helps poor people too and a lot of it is done by small farmers and not entrepreneurs; the fact that, in the long run, nothing is going to hold modernity back; the fact that a lot of what we prize as "nature" is really just a product of previous human shaping of the land; yadda, yadda. In the final analysis, I don't care.
I think there's room for a position similar to that of Emperor Charles V, who, upon seeing the new Renaissance cathedral the chapter of Cordoba had build in the middle of that city's great old mosque, is said to have remarked: "You have taken what was unique in the world, and marred it with something you could have put anywhere else." The world is a more interesting, better place with Irish Travellers and Maoris still in it. If claims full of internal contradictions help that, let them be.
@G- "Māori culture is intrinsically defined by it's existence within New Zealand." I agree. But how does that make it different from Euro-American culture? Or Jamaican culture? Or Haitian culture? All are very much shaped by the lands where they live, and by human interaction with that land. Certainly Russian culture is very much about living in Russia. But the UN does not recognize Americans, Swiss, Jamaicans or Russians as "indigenous." What is the difference between Maoris and Russians?
@John
What's the difference between the Māori and Russians? The Russians weren't colonized by foreigners, obviously.
Early contact between the Māori and Europeans was unusual in that it was largely peaceful, and the Māori were in many ways eager to adopt foreign ideas, technologies, religious views, etc. But the fact remains that ultimately, the British crown simply swooped in and unilaterally claimed ownership over Aotearoa, and then enforced their claim through violence or threat of violence. An indigenous decentralized culture was victimized by a foreign centralized one through military means.
The closest the Russians came to that sort of situation was the invasion of the Mongols - although that was quite different, as that was a decentralized foreign culture attacking a centralized one, and instead of permanently occupying the lands they simply extracted tribute from afar. And this tributary situation didn't last all that long, or have all that profound of an effect on the Russian people or culture. The Mongolian Empire imploded due to its inherent instability, the Russians threw off the "Tatar Yoke" as they called it, and they went right back to feuding amongst themselves and their neighbors as they had always done.
And of course, the Russians would later go on to colonize dozens of decentralized North Asian cultures pushing through Siberia to the Pacific, unilaterally claiming ownership over entire regions and their inhabitants, and enforcing that 'ownership' via force.
Obviously, the Russians are still indigenous to Russia. But they're certainly not indigenous to all the lands they conquered and set up brutal Imperial rule over.
I think that's another major aspect of how we ought to define things: "indigenous" peoples are ones who have NOT substantially spread beyond the place they are indigenous to. If the Māori had gone on to conquer or colonize other peoples - if they had formed a Māori Empire stretching across Australasia - we probably wouldn't think of them as being quite so indigenous.
But that's just one of the examples you give. Let's look at the others.
America has numerous issues to consider. First is relative recency - America just hasn't really been it's own distinct thing for very long, historically speaking. Absolutely it is now ~somewhat~ indigenous in regard to the unique aspects of the culture that have cropped up over time as a product of place... but you then typically are contrasting that to the Native American cultures which American culture directly supplanted or destroyed. American Imperialism cuts against American Indigeneity.
Second is the question of how distinct and unique American culture actually is from other cultures. Again, recency works against things here because there has been less time for things to change and evolve in unique ways. Absolutely we've diverged from our British origins - but perhaps not as much, or not in as many areas, as one might think.
This leads to a third problem: modern technology and communications limiting the scope of divergence over time. The Māori people diverged considerably from their Polynesian forebears not only because of the amount of time that passed since they separated, but also because they lost virtually all contact with the still extant Polynesian culture.
But America has never ~not~ been in direct contact with Britain - we've always had a constant culture reinforcement from our point of origin, particularly in certain highly significant areas such as governance, law, education, international relations, etc. We diverged slightly but noticeably in many places, but overall we kept a pretty firm grasp on key British (and European) cultural touchstones, limiting just how different things could get.
A fourth problem is that in the areas where we ~did~ change substantially, we didn't change and then settle into a new form that lasted - we instead continuously kept rechanging and reforming, at a very high rate of development. The truly distinct parts of American culture are also, unfortunately, quite distinct from each other over time. Most "indigenous" cultures are more stable that ours, and change their distinctive aspects more slowly and less radically.
Obviously, we're not somehow unique in this regard, but still...
Switzerland is a somewhat simpler topic - there was never a "Swiss Empire"; the Swiss never spread beyond their native Alps to conquer or colonize other peoples in other places; etc.
The Swiss are clearly "indigenous" to Switzerland in the sense that their society was massively shaped by the physical realities of life in the Alps - but it's also not quite ~entirely~ "indigenous", in the sense that it's a conglomeration of multiple neighboring cultures from the surrounding areas. It's somewhere in the middle of the scale, being reasonably distinct and absolutely a product of the place, but at the same time not having diverged too radically from the originating cultures that produced it, and having been more or less under continuous influence from said cultures over the centuries.
I think you can understand why the UN doesn't consider the Swiss an "indigenous people" with a little thought experiment: if the Swiss had been invaded and annexed by Germany, we likely ~would~ refer to them as the "indigenous" culture of the region, because they would be subject to rule by a foreign entity. But because the Swiss have spent centuries isolated and politically neutral (notwithstanding a few relatively brief interruptions), and they have maintained their own sovereignty and mastery over their own fates, their "indigenous" nature doesn't really need or deserve any special consideration.
As for Jamaica? I don't even know where to start with Jamaica... and maybe that tells us something.
Jamaica's history is just a mess.
The actual indigenous peoples, the Taíno, got wiped out by European invasion and colonization. The Spanish ruled the island for a time, importing African slaves to replace the failing Taíno population; the two groups intermixed to various degrees (and also intermixed with some of the few remaining Taíno, also somewhat with other Amerindian peoples from elsewhere in and around the Caribbean who came or were brought there) then the British took over, and added yet another layer of intermixing; the arrival of the British prompted most of the Spanish proper to flee - except for the Spanish Jews, who stayed; the fleeing Spanish didn't want their slaves to fall into British hands, so they freed them and those ex-slaves then fled into the hills and mountains to form clandestine "Maroon" communities beyond the reach of British rule; also, the British brought in indentured Irish at such a rate that they constituted the actual majority of Whites on the island, despite themselves being treated as little better than slaves.
All of this is further complicated by the fact that population numbers were very small in Jamaica for a very long time; as well as by long periods of relative lawlessness and rampant piracy; as well as by the incredibly complicated web of interrelations between all the various ethnicities and factions, which resulted in such bizarre situations as black slave rebellions being put down by the British with help from the black ex-slave Maroons; white clergymen taking up arms on behalf of black slaves against the white plantation owners; the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, but not the end of slavery itself for some time yet; the importation of Chinese and Indian workers to the island to work instead of slaves...
Ultimately, my judgement is that the situation in Jamaica was so turbulent and chaotic that an actual "Jamaican" culture cannot actually be said to have come into existence until the early 20th century - and even today, it's actually pretty hard to delineate what "Jamaican" culture actually is, because it contains so many distinct and disparate parts. It's hard to call such a mish-mash of different elements an "indigenous" culture, particularly when its history has been so incredibly turbulent, being so often so very radically reshaped and reformed over the years.
@John
You say you are bothered by the claim to indigenous status because it labels certain people as special and gives them rights others do not have. But in practice, aren't those rights and that special status simply a tiny protection, a sort of small, partial equalizer in a world of huge corporations, governments, and ultra-meritocrats who have powers--in effect and in practice, "rights"--that the rest of us don't have? Wouldn't removing indigenous status simply leave the world that much more open to extraction industries, cattle ranching conglomerates, development and energy ministries, Elon Muskoids, and whatnot, backed by lawyers, guns, and money, to do whatever they liked?
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