Submitted by AnarchoNeuroBunny in indigenous
I've been following some indigenous and anti-colonial movements for a while, but the more I learn the more I find it hard to define "indigenous" in my own political analysis. I'd like to ask how others define it.
I thought of a few options but none of them are quite satisfactory to me:
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People who are (descendants of) original inhabitants of the land. The obvious issue with this definition is how far back you go. For example, a lot of southern China (e.g. Guandong) have been inhabited by Han Chinese for a long time, but if you go back 3000 years, those places weren't inhabited by Han Chinese, but instead by Yue (Viet). They became Han proper through centuries of empire building, but this colonization/assimilation happened way too early for today's politics. So are Han Chinese the "original inhabitants" of those places? You could say no, but it wouldn't be useful for any political analysis today, especially when it comes to Hong Kong. Another issue with this definition is that it excludes nomadic peoples, whose cultures in today's settled civilization are the hardest to preserve. E.g. Romani people - are they indigenous?
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People who culturally have a non-extractive relationship with the land. This would make it easy to do political analysis (in other words, it's a lazy anarchist's definition), but obviously it is very exclusive. Cultures outside of the "Old World" can be authoritarian, war-like, and patriarchal even before colonizers arrived; some may have been pushed into these social systems by colonizers. Are they not indigenous? On the other hand, if a group of people start to live in a prefigurative commune, do they suddenly become indigenous?
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People who are targets of colonial policies. The problem is that this definition can be too broad. Colonizers can become colonized if their empire loses to another empire, but it doesn't make them "indigenous", e.g. Han Chinese in Taiwan during Japanese rule. Plus, some of the anti-colonial movements are quite literally nation-building projects, e.g. Uyghur and Tibetan independence movements.
Writing here I realized that I'm mentioning things related to China a lot. Perhaps the reason I'm having this question in the first place is that most of the discourse on indigenous peoples are about those who are colonized by white Europeans. When it comes to more nuanced politics that doesn't involve white people, suddenly things don't fit neatly anymore.
What are your thoughts?
rot wrote
i don't know if using indigenous outside of the americas works for this reason, here there is a clear line of the first people to live on the continent and their cultures opposed to those who came later though colonization or immigration