Talk:Indigenous peoples/Archive 1

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Miscellaneous commentary, to May 2005

Is this either NPOV or accurate?

Extremely few, e.g. Stone Age Amazonians, have not contacted European societies, and retain independence, enforcing it by hunting down and killing interlopers.

This whole article looks dodgy to me - lumping all 'indigenous peoples' together, and ascribing common behaviour to them.

From the article:

Historically, indigenous peoples have resisted all attempts by outsiders to define their identity or influence their traditional governance structures.

What social group is this not true of?

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There is a problem with the definition in that in many cases, the people who are considered indigenous arrived at the same time or later than "non-indigenous" peoples. This is the case with a large number of Native American tribes.

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Note: this article appears to be by the same author as the lengthy stuff about "ecoregional democracy" and "ecoregional constituencies", neither of which can be found on Google -- it appears to reflect their world-view.

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The new version is looking better... working towards NPOV The Anome

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The new version tends to the UN point of view. Which is mostly a bunch of dignity talk. It fails to make the close link between ecology and lifeways and languages which is what characterizes an 'indigenous' people with origins in prehistory.

All societies have origins in prehistory.

"Extremely few, e.g. Stone Age Amazonians, have not contacted European societies, and retain independence, enforcing it by hunting down and killing interlopers."

Can you break this sentence down grammatically? Are you saying that most (indigenous societies) do retain independence, and when they do it they do it by hunting down and killing interlopers, or are you saying that they don't usually retain independence? It's at the very least improperly puctuated and at the worst fractured, but I don't know how to fix it.

This is a fact. Rubber tappers going into tribal territory in the Western Amazon are killed by blowguns. The tribes know that they will get diseases they have no immunity to, as they've seen other tribes devastated this way by do-gooders and stray Europeans. There are I believe three such tribes left.

You say:

• There are I believe three such tribes left.

Really? What are their names? Please provide cites. Otherwise all you are providing is your opinions.

"ecoregional democracy" is sometimes called "bioregional districts" or "bioregional representation" or 200 other names - all slightly differently defined. Ecoregional democracy is a blanket term reflecting the new word "ecoregion" now defined strictly in ecology. It may not be the term that evolves for this, but that's an issue to discuss in that 'talk' section not here.

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I find this phrase confusing:

Advocates of the concept of indigenous peoples

I think the writer means:

Advocates for the practice of leaving the cultures of indigenous peoples intact, and not assimilating them into (so-called) civilization

The first phrase, if used at all, should be used in the sense of defining what an indigenous people is. The definition of what constitutes an indigenous people should be made distinct from the various positions that advocates take on how the powers in the outside world ought to deal with indigenous peoples:

1. assimilators, such as some missionaries (?) want to assimilate them (not me, by the way)
2. preservers want to preserve them: some because the idealize the state of man in nature (perhaps in a Rousseau-ish sense); others on other grounds.

Let's distinguish the various points of view, shall we?

User:Ed Poor

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Old talk moved from talk:indigenous people

Definition

I think the definition was intended merely to be politically correct. Technically, it would apply to any undigested/undigestable population within a country, ready to rebel and carve a bit of land for themselves.

• East Timor
• various "countries" entirely enclosed within South Africa
• people without a "homeland" in Iraq (Kurds) or Gaza/West Bank (those friendly, peace-loving Palestinians)

Ed Poor

Kalahari Bushmen

An example of this occurred in 2002 when the Government of Botswana expelled all the Kalahari Bushmen from the lands they had lived off for at least twenty thousand years, to make way for diamond mines. Government ministers made openly racist comments aboout the Bushmen, decribing them as "stone age creatures" and likening their forced eviction to a cull of elephants. This outrage passed almost without comment in the world's media, at a time when the eviction a number of white people from their land in nearby Zimbabwe was headline news.

The above needs to be rewritten, attributing the points of view to their advocates.

• Who called the ministers' comments "openly racist"?
• Who says it's an outrage?

Note that I'm not disputing the outrageousness of racist comments. Only that as an editor I must ensure that all POVs are attributed; the Wikipedia has no opinions and does not take sides. --Ed Poor

The outrage I was referring to was was the forced expulsion of the Bushmen, not the racism, but I take your point. I will try to calm down and re-write it without seeming to be so angry! 193.132.79.6

Thank you, 193.132.79.6 -- may I call you 193 for short? ;-) --Ed Poor

Excellent work. By taking out the snarl words racist and outrage, you transformed the above paragraph into an enduring work of encyclopedic scholarship. Please contribute more stuff like this! --Ed Poor

This article is stupid

This article is stupid.

It consists entirely of:

• several paragraphs about the UN definition of "indigenous people"
• a list of indigenous peoples

It doesn't actually say anything about the history, characteristics, present situation of problems of any indigenous people.

I don't want to read about homelands and occupied territories and other political maneuvering in this article, but about Bushmen and Australian aborigenes and American Indians & Eskimos, and the primitive tribesmen of South America and Borneo and Africa.

Not unless the international politics has some bearing on the plight of these people -- but how can the reader know this, unless the article talks about it? --Ed Poor

I believe you are profoundly wrong, Ed. In a literal sense, all people are indigenous people. I am indigenous to Brooklyn, for example. But this is not what "Indigenous people" means -- the term Indigneous People" does not refer primarily to real people, it refers to a concept that developed in the sphere on international law, human rights activism, and politics.

To think of the concept "indigenous people" otherwise would be to rely on colonialist (and implicitly racist) ethnocentric notions, like "primitive," that in fact ignore or erase the very things you are interested in, such as the history of specific peoples.

I do believe that there should be encyclopedia articles that cover the history and culture of the actual people to whom you refer, such as the !Kung and the Inuit, to avoid the pejorative terms you use above). But those should be separate articles about specfific, real people.

By the way, the concept of "indigenous people" has been crucial in the political mobilization of people like the !Kung and Inuit, and crucial in establishing their rights within the states that have colonized them. You are QUITE RIGHT that the article does not go far to show HOW international politics (and this concept) has had some bearing on their lives. This is a very fair criticism. But it does not make the article "stupid," it makes it -- like oh so many Wikipedia articles -- incomplete. I am sure that over time knowledgable people will fill in what is missing (this is after all the gamble that is wikipedia). Fortunately, the current "article" provides a bery smart and good basis for that, Slrubenstein

Maybe the article is mistitled, then. Since it is only about the legal and human rights aspects, i.e., relations of tribes to the countries they inhabit, it should perhaps be called "Legal status of indigenous peoples" or something like that. Also, we need to separate your advocacy (much of which I agree with) from any statements of fact, and attribute them appropriately. --Ed Poor

I don't think so Ed -- because "Legal Status of Indigenous Peoples" assumes that there just happen to be "indigenous people" out there. But there really was a time in human history when no one used the term "indigenous people." Also, this isn't just semantics -- it isn't that there were people out there who used to be called one thing, and now they are called another thing (by analogy, maybe people shift from calling something "tissues" to calling it "kleenex" but whatever you call it the thing is the same). It is more like there used to be thirteen colonies (some established by a company, some chartered by the king), and then there was "The United States of America." This is not just "changing the name" -- it involved the creation of a new thing, and this occured through political struggle and legal acts (you know, that Declaration thing -- and the Constitution). Moreover, "The United States" is not a "thing" in the saem way that tissue (or kleenex, whatever) is a "thing" -- the United States ia an idea, a radically new way of thinking about a thing that not every one agrees with (thus, not only the Revolutionary War, the Civil War too. Ideas matter!) Well, in the wame way, "Indigenous People" is not just a new phrase, it is a new idea, such a radically new idea it should be treated as a new thing too.

There should be an article on how this new thing came into existence, and what this new idea means. That is what this article is starting to do. Slrubenstein

Okay, then the 13 colonies turned into a new thing, never seen before on the face of the earth: a representative, constitutional democracy. So I guess there never were any indigenous people until the concept was created. Maybe I'm confusing them with "primitive tribes" as studied by anthropologists in "civilized countries".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put down Bushmen or Yanomamo. I'm just trying to understand where you're going with this article. I still don't get it.

What's the difference between indigenous people and so-called "primitive tribes"? I think of people living in a jungle huts far from civilization without electricity or modern medicine.

And in what sense would my father, a "native" of Long Island, be an indigenous person -- in contrast to the Indians who lived there before the Pilgrims landed?

Scholars pretty much never use the word "primitive" any more because it has no scientific meaning. There are indeed societies that harness less energy than others, or that are smaller -- obviously these are differences in scale. But "primitive (or traditional) /modern" suggests a radical qualitative difference that are unwarranted. Far from being scientific, these words convey Western beliefs -- true, Western beliefs about non-Westerners, but nevertheless they reflect Western beliefs, not objective facts. For starts, you could read the Wikipedia article on "Tribe." You could also read Torgovnik's book Gone Primitive or Kuper's The Invention of Primitive Society, as well as Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (as the titles suggest, books about how Westerners invented these ideas and imposed them on others).

Do you want to compare American Indians and Euro-Americans? fine -- no problem, there are lots of difference. Just like there are differences between French and Germans. But you do not need to use words like "tribe" or "primitive" to talk about the differences between Germans and French -- indeed, people DO use these words and they do so disparagingly (so during World War I Germans and French each called the other "savages" -- just propaganda); well, it would be the same when Europeans call N. Americans "savages" or "primitives," it is just propaganda. Talk about the differences, just do not use thes words. Believe me, there are much more informative ways to describe the differences.

As for your father and someone who lived in LI before the Pilgrims -- well, certainly, whatever that person was called back in 1600 or 1500, it most definitely was NOT "Indian" or "Native American" or "Indigenous Person." You want to learn something about them? You would learn more by finding out what they called themselves back then by imposing an anacronistic and inaccurate label like "Indian."

As for "objective" terminology: Literally speaking, your father is a "native" of long Island in exactly the same way as an "Indian" was -- they were both born in a particular place. Literally speaking, neither "Whites" nor "Indians" are "native" to the Americas in the sense that neither group evolved here -- both groupd immigrated from Eurasia, just at different times. So what is the "objective" difference? Well, Europeans came as conquerers and colonizers, killing Indians and driving them westward, then killing them again and driving them further West. This is the important difference -- and if you reread the article (which, by the way, I did not write and had a minimal role in revising) I think you will see that this comes out. Slrubenstein

No the person living in 1600 in Long Island was most certainly called an Indian in English. What they called themselves in their own language is a completely different matter. (And by the way there are plenty of self-identifying Eskimoes around.) --rmhermen

My mistake on the date -- I should have just said pre-Colombian. As for Eskimos, please share more information -- to the best of my admitedly limited knowledge, most groups that use the word "Eskimo" combine it with another name -- one word that identifies themselves in their own language, and another word ("Eskimo") that reflects the way others (Athabascan-French-Canadians) identify them. "self-identify" is a tricky concept in this context. In any event, the continued use of "eskimo" is certainly a product of a couple of centureis of colonialism, alluded to in the UN definition, Slrubenstein

The Alaskan Eskimo call themselves such to seperate themselves from the Aleuts. However they are listed listed as having three dialects so perhaps they have three tribal names (or more). Like being European and British. --rmhermen

Innu

Why are the Innu included separately from Native Americans? I understood them to be a First Nations group (i.e. unlike the Inuit). - user:Montrealais

The thrust of this article

The thrust of this article seems to be the _position_ that we civilized people should stop calling primitive tribes by such a demeaning term as "primitive". Unfortunately, this advocacy has replaced (or at best delayed) any definition of what an "indigenous people" is!! --Ed Poor

It is inappropriate to list Celts as the indigenous people of Ireland (and perhaps Brittany) as they ARE the prevailing culture. It is like listing the Han as indigenous people of China. Fred Bauder 14:51 Nov 5, 2002 (UTC)

Ed Poor: Why is that, Fred? I thought indigenous meant "they always lived there before the invaders came". Merriam-Webster's definition is

"having originated in and being produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment" [1]

and here are the synonyms for native:

synonyms NATIVE, INDIGENOUS, ENDEMIC, ABORIGINAL mean belonging to a locality. NATIVE implies birth or origin in a place or region and may suggest compatibility with it <native tribal customs>. INDIGENOUS applies to species or races and adds to NATIVE the implication of not having been introduced from elsewhere <maize is indigenous to America>. ENDEMIC implies being peculiar to a region <edelweiss is endemic in the Alps>. ABORIGINAL implies having no known race preceding in occupancy of the region <the aboriginal peoples of Australia>. [2]

I disagree with Fred for two reasons.

First, "indigenous" has a purely literal and colloquial meaning, synonymous with native, when it is applied to an individual rather than a group: I am a native of Brooklyn, I am indenous to Brooklyn, meaning, I was born there.

• This is the meaning we need to avoid in the subject article. Fred Bauder 12:40 Nov 6, 2002 (UTC)

Second, refering to a group rather than an individual, I cdo not think the word must refer to a numerical minority. There is only one sense in which the word is not consistent with Celt -- indigenous meaning a group of people who are peripheral or outside of a modern nation state. But there are two senses I think are perfectly consistent with Celtic. The first is, a continuous relationship to people living in the area prior to the establishment of a modern Nation State. The second is, a group of people who have been colonized by a Nation State -- this certain can apply to the Irish vis a vis their relationship to the English. Slrubenstein

There is room for this notion in the subject article, an indigenous people who has achieved statehold would not thereby fall from the category. Fred Bauder 12:40 Nov 6, 2002 (UTC)

There are problems with this article. As usually used indigenous people refers to traditional tribal cultures overwealmed by colonialism or domination by a more advanced culture. We are using it here simply to refer to any dominated culture. Thus the preliminary discussion of primitive or uncivilized grates even more than it otherwise would. I'm not sure what should happen, I think it might be best to limit the article to traditional tribal cultures and find homes for the other situations somewhere else (situations such as the Kurds, Celts, Palestinians, Tibetans). Fred Bauder 13:24 Nov 6, 2002 (UTC)

I agree completely with Fred that "Indigenous People" should not be extended to any "dominated culture." The working class is not an "Indigenous People," nor are African-Americans or women. Fred is right that it must be more specific. Nevertheless, I disagree that it should be limited to "traditional tribal cultures," given that Hobsbawm, Ranger, Fried, and Pels and Salemink, as well as Derrida and others, have argued so convincingly that the very binaris "traditional/modern" "primitive/civilized" are themselves products and instruments of colonial domination. Slrubenstein

With all due respect, what is offensive about the term "indigenous"? It is hardly as pejorative as terms like "natives" or "aborigines" often are. In many contexts, as far as I see it is the only good word one can use when expressing concepts such as the contrast between those who lived in the American continents before 1492 and those who have arived from other continents since.

Of course any such word is wrong when it is used to make broad statements about many groups of people. Syncrolecyne

How this article reads

Cough I think parts of this article reads like some liberal-arts academia politically-correct geeful-about-having-one-over the silly-conservatives-and-bad-whities university-lecture. And I'm not even right-wring!

Well, could you please tell us: which parts, and how they are either factually inaccurate, or lack NPOV? Slrubenstein

Indigenous vs. Primitive

The problem with this page, IMHO, is that it doesn't deal with INDIGENOUS people at all, but rather (for lack of a better word) PRIMITIVE people. As has been pointed out, there are many groups of people which are indigenous (whatever that means) to the areas in which they live but are not indigenous people in the sense the article is written (e.g. most of the inhabitants of the Old World!).

I don't care how PC or relativist you are, there clearly is a difference between those cultures and societies which embrace and accept change from the outside and have joined the "global mainstream", and those which have not.

Do you mean for example Hasidic Jews? Well, I don't think anyone ever calls them "indigenous" and I certainly wouldn't call them "primitive."

As for those so-called "indigenous people" who have adopted modern ways, I'd make the argument that they're simply then no longer indigenous peoples

So if an American Indian uses a cell-phone, they are no longer Indian because their grandparents didn't use cell-phones? But my grandparents didn't use cell-phones either. So if I use a cell-phone, am I no longer an American? Oh, maybe you do not mean "modern" as in "contemporary," maybe you mean "modern" as in "Western. But wait, does it work the other way around too? If I eat Chinese food, which is not "Western," am I no longer an American?

(in the sense this article and the UN uses the term, as misleading as it is). -- stewacide 05:52 25 Jun 2003 (UTC)

In any event, it does not matter what argument you would make. This is not an article about what you (or I) believe. There is a term out there, "Indigenous People," which many people -- scholars, politicians, lawyers -- use to refer to a variety of people who themselves use the term for self-identification. Our task here is to write an encyclopedia article describing who uses this phrase, how, and why. Slrubenstein

Economic development

What is the issue of economic development? Is it the probelm of too much development (modernisation, Westernaisation... can't find my thesaurus) or not enough? Andy G 13:00, 31 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Beats me. I think that section of the article is muddled. I wish that instead of saying "some people" contributors would quote real participants in real debates... Slrubenstein

Semang and Sakai

The Semang and Sakai are distinct, but both located on the Malay Peninsula as of the 1911 Britannica. 169.207.90.47 02:33, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Two Sakai

Hi, I found a link from here to Sakai. But the article Sakai is a description of a city with the same name in Japan. Here Sakai means another town obviously. I found this page after make a redirection from Sakai to [[Sakai, Osaka]]. Please to deal with things better. I am a newbie without good tips on this case. Thank you for your notice. KIZU

Hi KIZU, thanks for fixing the Sakai reference. I've further disambiguated Sakai to include three places in Japan, as well as the Sakai tribe. It's users like you who pitch in and fix things that make Wikipedia a success! Kevyn 09:25, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Mythical

aboriginal (a mythical pre-Roman people of central Italy) What makes people think that as long as "mythical" is added to a sentence, they can just invent anything? too many comic books? Wetman 04:23, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)