The No-Nonsense Guide to Indigenous People

Foreword by Hugh Brody

Introduction

1 Who are indigenous peoples?

2 Colonialism and conquest

3 Land and nature

4 Facing the problems

5 Fighting back

6 Music and magic

7 Development, justice and future challenges

Contacts

Copyright

Foreword

THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD is inseparable from the fate of indigenous peoples. From Australia to Amazonia, groups who occupied the fertile shores and river valleys have been pushed into far, infertile corners of their own worlds, or exterminated by explorers, colonizers and nation states. This means that the morality of our world is also bound up in their fate. How a ‘modern’ state views and deals with aboriginal peoples is revealing. The survivors may be in ‘remote’ arid, icy or hidden landscapes, but their significance lies at the center, not the periphery, of our world.

Lotte Hughes’ remarkable book charts the histories and politics of indigenous societies. Some issues are complicated and unresolved: the notion of ‘indigenous’ is full of contention, with a maze of definitions. A strength of this Guide is that it acknowledges difficulties and refuses deconstruction, without obscuring the variety and complexity of indigenous societies.

The Guide describes the achievements, as well as the grief and oppression. It highlights the key feature of indigenous systems: a nurturing, respectful relationship to the land. Indigenous peoples wish to ensure that the land they use and the creatures they kill to eat will continue to sustain them. This is revealed in a fascinating intersection between religious and material relationships to the world. Many Europeans have taken inspiration from this, sometimes being derided as naïve and romantic. For indigenous peoples can be just as ruthless with their environment or with one another as the rest of us. In addressing romanticism, Lotte Hughes points out that indigenous societies need the world around them to stay the same: survival depends on the land and animals remaining as they are, with only minor changes. To note this is not to romanticize but to report social and economic realities. Environmental conservatism does not make people ‘good’, or mean they are without human cruelties – but it does mean that they have tended to be good environmentalists. It also means that they have expertise that can benefit not just local territories, but all peoples.

The success of their environmentalism makes their displacement all the more poignant. For loss of land usually means the loss of the possibility to be themselves. They rely on the territory: where ancestors have nurtured the earth, cared for the animals, propitiated the spirits. A cruel irony of their displacement is that they have often been accused, by those wishing to displace them, of killing too many animals, over-fishing or neglecting the land. Hence many groups have been forced out of national parks in east and southern Africa, despite having ensured, by their customs and skills, the enduring beauty and abundance of these places. Elsewhere, mines, forestry and intensive agriculture have dispossessed so many.

But this Guide also tells of the fight back. Indigenous groups have formed international alliances, and have a permanent presence at the UN. They are battling to secure rights to live on their lands, to check logging, to preserve fisheries, to manage their own resources and to take effective part in government. These struggles may be versions of David and Goliath, without promise of miraculous outcome. But there have been successes. The challenge now is for indigenous peoples to define, and the rest of the world to respect, a development model that is neither an unrealistic ideal of times gone nor an acceptance of final assimilation in colonial nation states. Indigenous peoples ask that their voices be heard, their stories be told and that they take their place, on their own terms, in their own lands. This No-Nonsense Guide lays out the issues behind and within this challenge.

Hugh Brody

Anthropologist, filmmaker and author of Maps and Dreams and The Other Side of Eden

Introduction

SINCE THIS BOOK was first published in 2003, there has been a sea-change in the world of indigenous peoples and their rights.

The most significant change was the adoption in 2007, by the United Nations General Assembly, of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This followed more than two decades of dialogue, and represents (in the words of the indigenous rights’ organization Cultural Survival) ‘a blueprint for how Indigenous People worldwide should be treated’. However, the Declaration has yet to be fully implemented, and the struggle continues to see its provisions, described in 46 articles, applied internationally.

The first International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People (1995-2004) has come and gone, and a second Decade began in January 2005. Indigenous peoples’ rights have become an increasingly important subject in international law, and a series of landmark legal judgments has broken new ground. As the result of emerging rights regimes, the establishment at the UN of a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the widening of democratic space and flowering of civil society in many countries, together with the proliferation of international and national development agencies, we have witnessed a surge in indigenous activism and advocacy.

A global indigenous rights industry has arisen, the effects of which are not always positive. Groups are fiercely competing for donor funds and other resources, and some of the poorest communities – who may lack access to power-brokers and policy-makers – can be marginalized in the process. On the plus side, indigenous activists have been able to influence policy-making – on issues such as environmental management and tourism on indigenous lands – and continue trying to ensure that indigenous peoples’ needs and rights are taken into account.

Some of the most striking changes have come about in South America, not least in Bolivia, which, since 2006, has had, in the form of Evo Morales, its first indigenous president. Domestically he has introduced policies benefiting indigenous communities through land reforms and redistribution of wealth, while, on the international stage, in climate negotiations, President Morales has argued from an indigenous perspective for greater respect to be shown to ‘Mother Earth’.

Another fascinating development is the phenomenon of ‘becoming indigenous’. This refers to the attempt by certain communities to reconstruct and present themselves as indigenous people, when they may not meet the widely accepted criteria. While understandable, in parts of the world where identities and claims are increasingly politicized and essentialized, and where people are competing for dwindling resources, this can be highly problematic.

This book tries to avoid romanticizing indigenous peoples, which some of the literature tends to do. I have tried to strike a balance between, for example, focusing on victimization and successful struggle; too much emphasis can often be put on the former, and not enough on how people have fought back. Rather than paint too rosy a picture of indigenous life and knowledge, I have also described tensions and contradictions. Indigenous people demand the right to speak for themselves, and this No-Nonsense Guide includes as many direct voices as possible.

All the communities mentioned in these pages deserve a book in their own right. It is impossible to include everyone and, in such a small space, to do justice to all the peoples, historical milestones and events that could be covered. Our aim is to provide illustrative snapshots, in the hope that readers will be inspired to find out more.

Lotte Hughes, November 2011

1 Who are indigenous peoples?

What is the difference between indigenous peoples, tribal peoples and minorities? And what does ‘indigenous’ actually mean? Where and how indigenous peoples live – and how they made a breakthrough at the United Nations.

A MIDDLE-AGED AMERICAN woman tourist and a young Maasai man bumped into each other at the entrance of a luxury hotel in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro reserve. It was late 1983, and my Maasai friend Taté held a copy of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he happened to be reading. He was dressed in a red toga-like garment (shuka) and adorned with beaded jewelry, looking every inch a ‘man of the bush’ – yet carrying a symbol of modernity and literacy.

The tourist timidly asked Taté in pidgin English, raising her camera: ‘Can-I-take-your-picture?’ My friend coolly looked her up and down. With some amusement he said, in perfect American-accented English acquired from US missionary teachers: ‘Only if you are paying in US dollars, lady.’ She fled, embarrassed, without taking a photo.

What does this exchange say about the way we often treat indigenous people? The tourist clearly assumed that Taté did not understand English. She did not notice the book, or perhaps not being a lover of litera­ture, maybe did not know what it was. She probably thought him decorative and exotic, and with the best will in the world, wanted to capture his picture to take home and show the folks (as perhaps many of us have done). It would end up alongside photos of lions and jungles, part of a gallery of images of wild Africa. He, meanwhile, had other ideas. Tourists are welcome in Ngorongoro because they bring much-needed money. But since Maasai communities were forced out of the crater some years ago to make way for tourism and ‘conservation’ (Ngorongoro is an extinct volcano’s caldera), they have not seen many direct benefits of either activity. They were, and are, fed up with being treated like human animals in a zoo – and widely seen as dumb and stupid, too. If she wanted his photo, he wanted to make a dollar on the deal. He thought the whole thing quite amusing; she was just confused. They were beings from completely different worlds, collid­ing in space and bruised by the collision. The story of indigenous peoples mirrors this one in many ways, but their struggle for recognition is usually much more serious, and the collision a lot more painful.

Definitions

Indigenous peoples are generally referred to in the plural, because there are many different groups who make up the entire global tapestry of indigenous peo­ples. The use of plural indicates the diversity of people within the group as a whole.

People do not agree on definitions, and in fact there is no unambiguous definition of the concept. Indigenous peoples themselves claim the right to define who they are, and reject the idea that outsiders can do so. They argue that self-identification as indige­nous is one of their basic rights. Nevertheless anthropologists, for example, tend to use the term indigenous peoples to describe a non-dominant group in a particular territory, with a more or less acknowl­edged claim to be aboriginal – a word now used (with an initial capital letter) for the indigenous peoples of Australia in particular. But in its broadest sense, abo­riginal simply means ‘original inhabitants’. They are the people who were there first, who may also call themselves First Peoples or First Nations.

The Aboriginal peoples of Australia were undoubt­edly there first, and the same is true of other groups such as the Maya of Guatemala, Central America, and certain (some would say all) African peoples. But in some places the issue is not always so clear cut. Neither is it clear cut within Africa where, for example, nomadic migrants from the north of the continent dis­placed other early peoples from territories further south which the incomers later claimed as their ances­tral lands. Though an indigenous people may have arrived in a particular territory before other ethnic groups, there is a problem with the word ‘first’. In some cases, who knows who got there first? The histo­ry of the world is the story of human migration – successive waves of people moving here and there, dis­placing other populations as they moved, conquered and occupied new territory. When you start digging, as archeologists have, you find that the terms ‘original’ and ‘first’ are not always strictly accurate. Other com­munities can claim to be first-comers, or to have arrived in the same region simultaneously. But some of those first-comers – like the Arawaks of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola – are now extinct, so they cannot speak for themselves.

It may be safer to say that indigenous peoples arrived in a territory before single nation states were formed, though to complicate matters this is equally true of some other communities who do not self-identify as indigenous, such as the Kikuyu of Kenya. Also, some indigenous peoples such as Native Americans were organized as sovereign nations long before European colonists arrived; for example, the Iroquois Confederacy comprised six nations and operated a highly structured state system.

However, these nations did not form single nation states as we know them today.1 The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) gives this definition, as part of a longer one:

‘Indigenous peoples are the disadvantaged descen­dants of those peoples that inhabited a territory prior to the formation of a state. The term indigenous may be defined as a characteristic relating the identity of a particular people to a particular area and distinguish­ing them culturally from other people or peoples. When, for example, immigrants from Europe settled in the Americas and Oceania, or when new states were created after colonialism was abolished in Africa and Asia, certain peoples became