Indigenous Peoples and Colonialism

Global Perspectives

Colin Samson, Carlos Gigoux

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745672526, 9780745672519
• eBook ISBN: 9781509514571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Indigenous peoples have gained increasing international visibility in their fight against longstanding colonial occupation by nation-states. Although living in different locations around the world and practising highly varied ways of life, indigenous peoples nonetheless are affected by similar patterns of colonial dispossession and violence. In defending their collective rights to self-determination, culture, lands and resources, their resistance and creativity offer a pause for critical reflection on the importance of maintaining indigenous distinctiveness against the homogenizing forces of states and corporations.

This timely book highlights significant colonial patterns of domination and their effects, as well as responses and resistance to colonialism. It brings indigenous peoples? issues and voices to the forefront of sociological discussions of modernity. In particular, the book examines issues of identity, dispossession, environment, rights and revitalization in relation to historical and ongoing colonialism, showing that the experiences of indigenous peoples in wealthy and poor countries are often parallel and related.

With a strong comparative scope and interdisciplinary perspective, the book is an essential introductory reading for students interested in race and ethnicity, human rights, development and indigenous peoples? issues in an interconnected world.

1
Identity

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples it is our beliefs, our culture, and our family histories that contribute to our sense of who we are and what we mean to others. They are our source of belonging – and they anchor us and steer our course through our lives.

Mick Gooda (2011)

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, Mick Gooda, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, referred to his Aboriginal identity as a dynamic and interactive process of self-recognition firmly rooted in tradition, culture and community values. For him, indigenous identity is a collective identity that provides a sense of self, purpose and direction. Castells (2004: 6) argues that ‘identity refers to the process of construction of meaning on the basis of a cultural attribute, or a related set of cultural attributes, that is given priority over other sources of meaning’. However, for indigenous peoples the process of self-identification goes beyond the attachment to the cultural attributes of a community and extends to the special relationship with the lands where those cultural attributes are formed, exercised and given meaning. Indigenous individuals often recognize themselves as being part of distinct and independent, although often changing and overlapping, communities, which in turn are linked to territories. As a result, the choice to self-identify is a fundamental principle in the struggle for indigenous rights. However, this principle is often denied. Past and present colonial governments have not only deprived indigenous peoples of their lands and resources but also prevented self-identification through imposed administrative definitions as to who indigenous peoples are.

This chapter sets the scene for the understanding of indigenous peoples in the contemporary world by discussing a number of general considerations around identity, including self-identification and imposed identities.

Numbers of indigenous peoples

According to the UN report State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (UN DESA 2009: 21), there are approximately 370 million indigenous peoples around the world and, although they represent 5 per cent of the world population, they constitute 15 per cent of the world’s poor. This poverty is exacerbated by the geographical fragmentation of whole peoples across regions and national borders. For example, the Aymara peoples live in Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina; the San peoples in Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe; the Mohawk or Haudenosaunee peoples are spread across the US–Canada border; Inuit live in the United States, Canada, Greenland and Russia; the Mapuche peoples in Chile and Argentina; and the Saami in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia. As a consequence of assimilation policies and adverse social conditions, large numbers of indigenous peoples live in non-indigenous settings such as cities, settlements, reservations, stations, government-built villages and urban enclaves, but significant numbers inhabit their traditional territories in rainforests, highlands, deserts, plains and tundra, much of which constitute the world’s last remaining areas of high biodiversity. In these regions, indigenous peoples’ ways of life vary from pastoralists and hunter-gatherers to small-scale farmers.

Table 1.1 provides a general overview of the population distribution of indigenous peoples in selected countries around the world according to national censuses. Indigenous peoples live in both rich and poor countries, and in some cases they represent large proportions of the overall state population. However, statistics from official sources must be treated with scepticism because of varying and often unreliable data collection methods and political manipulation in many places. This notwithstanding, current official numbers of indigenous peoples represent dramatic population declines as a result of the violence and disease that accompanied colonization almost everywhere.

In most countries, there are many distinct indigenous groups. For example, in the United States there are 566 federally recognized tribes, while Canada recognizes 630 First Nations governments. In Mexico, there are around 60 different indigenous groups, while in Bolivia there are 36 such groups recognized by the state. In Australia, there are several hundred Aboriginal groups, while in Japan there is only one. However, states often configure indigenous peoples into conveniently segmented or conglomerate colletivities and manipulate the criteria for indigenous identity in order to exclude and/or underrepresent for political and economic purposes (Axelsson and Sköld 2011: 1). State control over indigenous peoples is often organized through state bureaucracies that deal specifically with them. Examples of these include the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in the United States, Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC), the Corporación Nacional Indígena (CONADI) in Chile, the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas (CDI) in Mexico, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) in the Philippines, the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) in Brazil, the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination (OIPC) in Australia and, in Malaysia, the Orang Asli Affairs Department. These state bureaucracies play a central role in defining indigenous identity as well as formulating social policies, allocating resources and even approving research.

Table 1.1 Number and percentage of indigenous peoples in selected countries

Sources: ECLAC 2014; USCB 2010; SSB 2014; SNZ 2013; IWGIA 2015; Canada’sNHS 2011; IBGE 2010; COAC 2015; EYROC 2014; ABS 2011

Country	Number of indigenous peoples	% of total population
Bolivia	6,216,026	62.2
Guatemala	5,881,009	41.0
Mexico	16,933,283	15.1
New Zealand	598,605	14.9
Philippines	12–20,000,000	10–20
Chile	1,805,243	11.0
India	84,300,000	8.2
Ecuador	1,018,176	7
Namibia	122,000–129,000	5.7–6.1
Canada	1,400,685	4.3
Australia	669,900	3
Botswana	50–60,000	3
Taiwan	533,600	2.28
United States	5,226,034	1.7
Republic of Congo	50,000	1.2
Norway	55,700	1
Malaysia	178,197	0.6
South Africa	316,500	0.6
Brazil	817,963	0.44
Russia	260,000	0.2
Japan	16,996	0.0179

Indigenous peoples’ ways of life are hugely diverse. Thousands of languages containing distinct ways of conceptualizing the world are spoken. Indigenous peoples inherit a huge range of cultural patrimonies and have adopted many different kinds of social organizations. Despite their uniqueness, imposed changes have dramatically affected their wellbeing and cultural integrity. State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (UN DESA 2009: 1) describes the social, economic and cultural consequences of these changes:

The situation of indigenous peoples in many parts of the world continues to be critical: indigenous peoples face systemic discrimination and exclusion from political and economic power; they continue to be over-represented among the poorest, the illiterate, the destitute; they are displaced by wars and environmental disasters; the weapon of rape and sexual humiliation is also turned against indigenous women for the ethnic cleansing and demoralization of indigenous communities; indigenous peoples are dispossessed of their ancestral lands and deprived of their resources for survival, both physical and cultural; they are even robbed of their very right to life. In more modern versions of market exploitation, indigenous peoples see their traditional knowledge and cultural expressions marketed and patented without their consent or participation. Of the some 7,000 languages today, it is estimated that more than 4,000 are spoken by indigenous peoples. Language specialists predict that up to 90 per cent of the world’s languages are likely to become extinct or threatened with extinction by the end of the century. This statistic illustrates the grave danger faced by indigenous peoples.

As well as all the other losses, the startling decline and disappearance of indigenous languages is emblematic both of the problem of indigenous cultural survival and the larger loss of valuable human knowledge that disappears with languages.

Constructions of indigenous identity in Western thought

While self-recognition is an important principle of indigenous peoples’ identity, indigenous communities almost always prioritize collective over individual identity. However, in the Western liberal democratic world in which nation-states constitute the predominant authorities, collective identity is problematic in two ways. First, modern Western constructions of the self emphasize the individual as the primary agent in relation to government, law and the economy. The prioritization of the individual extends back to the European Enlightenment and continued in influential twentieth-century US sociological conceptions of individual identity in the works of Cooley (1902), Mead (1934), Goffman (1959) and Riesman (1961), the latter articulating how twentieth-century middle-class Americans had made individualism a matter of group conformity. The individual is also privileged by psychoanalysis. Deriving from Freud (1927) and Jung (1916) and later thinkers such as Lacan (2006), the individual self is constructed either as something created by the conditions of society or as having particular psychic qualities inherent in human nature. If this is who we are, indigenous peoples’ special relationship with their lands as the foundation for a collective sense of identity has little place.

Second, and somewhat contradictorily, colonial policies imposed collective identities on indigenous peoples through the racial classifications that were (and are) used for administrative and conceptual purposes. Writing on the experience of the Anishinaabeg (also known as Chippewa or Ojibwe), Vizenor (1984: 19) explains how indigenous group identity was created: ‘The cultural and political histories of the Anishinaabeg were written in colonial language by those who invented the Indian, renamed the tribes, allotted the land, divided ancestries by geometric degrees of blood, and categorized identities on federal reservations.’ Furthermore, the notion of what Vizenor terms the indian represents an epistemological imposition of colonial power: ‘the indian is the absence, natives the presence, and an absence because the name is a discoverable, and a historical simulation of distinct native cultures’ (Vizenor and Lee 1999: 84). The colonial concept of the ‘Indian’ was a political act of defining people in order to dominate them and their lands.

This construction of indigenous identity as a kind of ‘absence’ is a legacy of contested legal, political and cultural debates embodied in philosophical, social scientific and other Western texts. Both individualization and racialization of indigenous identities are built upon ideological frameworks that accompanied colonial processes. As Miller (1998: 101) points out, prominent non-indigenous historians have told native histories ‘by disregarding . . . living generations’, and in doing so reproduce familiar patterns of colonial extraction.

A vital part of the justification for the colonization of indigenous peoples and their lands was (and to some extent remains) the claim that indigenous peoples are individually, psychologically and collectively deficient in the various qualities that comprise what Europeans and other colonists saw as civilization. Comparisons made by European observers revealed faults in indigenous societies and economies and in their psyches. These became both an important rationale for colonization and a means to situate indigenous peoples. It is therefore no accident that these comparisons coincided with the Great Land Rush (Weaver 2003), which included the westward expansion in North America, colonial settlement across Australia and New Zealand, and throughout Africa. Hence, it is important to underline that the principle of self-identification adopted at the international level is the preferred means of establishing identity, and that in many respects this is a reaction to a history in which identities were attributed to indigenous peoples in order to demean them and justify exercising authority over them (Cobo 1986: para. 381; UNDRIP 2007: Art. 33. 1).

Undoubtedly, the seeds of these imputed identities were present earlier in the writings of many of the important Enlightenment figures (Eze 1997) as well as in the pre-Enlightenment imagination of non-European peoples. Various images of monstrous creatures, wild men, giant Amazonian women and amalgams of humans and animals had circulated in the Greco-Roman world, medieval texts and encyclopaedias (Jahoda 1999). These frightening depictions are seen in engravings by artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Andrea Mantegna, and world maps such as the Mappa Mundi of 1300 in Hereford Cathedral, England. Early European explorers who encountered indigenous peoples from Columbus onwards were imbued with this medieval imagery and knowledge. Hence, the first explorers saw the New World in ‘preconceived terms’ (Moseley ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Identity
• 2 Colonization
• 3 Land
• 4 Environment
• 5 Rights
• 6 Culture
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement