It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the “Indigenous”

Identity evolves. Social categories shrink or expand, become stiffer or more elastic, more specific or more abstract. What it means to be white or Black, Indian or American, able-bodied or not shifts as we tussle over language, as new groups take on those labels and others strip them away.

On August 3, 1989, the Indigenous identity evolved. Moringe ole Parkipuny, a Maasai activist and a former member of the Tanzanian Parliament, spoke before the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, in Geneva—the first African ever to do so. “Our cultures and way of life are viewed as outmoded, inimical to national pride, and a hindrance to progress,” he said. As a result, pastoralists like the Maasai, along with hunter-gatherers, “suffer from common problems which characterize the plight of indigenous peoples throughout the world. The most fundamental rights to maintain our specific cultural identity and the land that constitutes the foundation of our existence as a people are not respected by the state and fellow citizens who belong to the mainstream population.”

In his master’s thesis, Parkipuny condemned the Masai Range Project, a twenty-million-dollar scheme funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to boost livestock productivity. Naturally, then, U.S.A.I.D. was resistant when the Tanzanian government hired him to join the project. In the end, he was sent to the United States to learn about “proper ranches.” He travelled around until, one day, a Navajo man invited him to visit the Navajo Nation, the reservation in the Southwest.

“I stayed with them for two weeks, and then with the Hopi for two weeks,” he told Hodgson. “It was my first introduction to the indigenous world. I was struck by the similarities of our problems.” The disrepair of the roads reminded him of the poor condition of cattle trails in Maasailand.

Parkipuny had always thrived on confrontations with authority. Once, as a high schooler, he was nearly expelled when he burned grass (the Maasai method of bush clearing) instead of cutting it, as instructed. He later recalled that, when the headmaster threatened to hit him, he replied, “If you beat me with a stick I will get mine, because my traditions do not allow this. I ask you to give me another punishment.” This outspokenness propelled his activism. Following his American sojourn, he started to publicize the Maasai’s plight in international circles, linking it with other struggles. He met members of tribal nations in New Mexico and Canada to sharpen his understanding of Indigenous issues, and allied with the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, headquartered in Copenhagen.

By the time Parkipuny showed up in Geneva, the concept of “indigenous” had already undergone major transformations. The word—from the Latin indigena, meaning “native” or “sprung from the land”—has been used in English since at least 1588, when a diplomat referred to Samoyed peoples in Siberia as “Indigenæ, or people bred upon that very soyle.” Like “native,” “indigenous” was used not just for people but for flora and fauna as well, suffusing the term with an air of wildness and detaching it from history and civilization. The racial flavor intensified during the colonial period until, again like “native,” “indigenous” served as a partition, distinguishing white settlers—and, in many cases, their slaves—from the non-Europeans who occupied lands before them.

Then came the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Liberation movements flourished. In New Zealand, the Polynesian Panthers worked with the group Ngā Tamatoa to rally for Maori rights. In the United States, the Red Power movement spawned groups like the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council. Inspired by decolonization, activists from these groups coalesced, turning indigeneity into a global identity. What linked its members was firstness. Peoples like the Maori and the Sioux are not just marginalized minorities, activists stressed; they are aboriginal nations whose land and sovereignty have been usurped. With time, however, the identity was stretched further. When Parkipuny showed up in Geneva, activists were consciously remodelling indigeneity to encompass marginalized peoples worldwide, including, with Parkipuny’s help, in Africa.

Today, nearly half a billion people qualify as Indigenous. If they were a single country, it would be the world’s third most populous, behind China and India. Exactly who counts as Indigenous, however, is far from clear. A video for the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues begins, “They were always here—the original inhabitants.” Yet many peoples who are now considered Indigenous don’t claim to be aboriginal—the Maasai among them. According to Maasai oral histories, their ancestors arrived in Tanzania several hundred years ago from a homeland they call Kerio, likely situated near South Sudan.

Conversely, being first doesn’t seem to make you Indigenous. A handful of Gaelic monks and then the Vikings were the first people to arrive in Iceland (they settled there earlier than the Maori arrived in New Zealand), yet their descendants, the Icelanders, are rarely touted as Indigenous. Farther east, modern-day Scandinavians can trace most of their ancestry to migrations occurring in 4000 and in 2500 B.C., but it’s the Sami reindeer herders, whose Siberian ancestors arrived in Scandinavia closer to 1500 B.C., who get an annual entry in the “Indigenous World” yearbook.

In place of firstness, a U.N. fact sheet lists self-identification as the key criterion. This doesn’t quite work, either. It is true that some surprising candidates have gained recognition through activist self-designation, such as the Mincéirs of Ireland. (The Mincéirs, sometimes mistakenly called “Irish gypsies,” may have separated from the settled Irish population only several hundred years ago.) Other such groups have been denied recognition. In 1999, when Basters, mixed-race descendants of Khoi pastoralists and Afrikaners, read a statement at a U.N. forum about Indigenous affairs, hundreds of delegates walked out in protest. At the same time, many people are called Indigenous without their knowledge or consent.

If it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the Indigenous to be indigenous, what fills the conceptual space? A natural candidate, worryingly, is primitiveness. As several recent books show, centuries of colonialism have entangled indigeneity with outdated images of simple, timeless peoples unsullied by history. In “Beyond Settler Time,” Mark Rifkin observes that popular representations freeze Indigenous peoples in “a simulacrum of pastness.” In “Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology,” Samuel J. Redman describes how efforts to document dying Indigenous cultures often centered on a search for “an idyllic, heavily romanticized, and apparently already bygone era of uncorrupted primitive societies.”

The conflation of indigeneity with primitiveness can be stifling. Indigenous intellectuals—including the Lenape scholar Joanne Barker and the Maori scholar Evan Poata-Smith—write about the pressure to adopt identities that are “primordial,” “naturalistic,” and “unchanging.” Fail to do so, they say, and you risk looking inauthentic. Rather than being harmless, Barker notes in “Native Acts” (2011), such standards make it “impossible for Native peoples to narrate the historical and social complexities of cultural exchange, change, and transformation—to claim cultures and identities that are conflicted, messy, uneven, modern, technological, mixed.”

Indigeneity is powerful. It can give a platform to the oppressed. It can turn local David-vs.-Goliath struggles into international campaigns. Yet there’s also something troubling about categorizing a wildly diverse array of peoples around the world within a single identity—particularly one born of an ideology of social evolutionism, crafted in white-settler states, and burdened with colonialist baggage. Can the status of “Indigenous” really be globalized without harming the people it is supposed to protect?

Peoples in Australia, New Zealand, and North America have long sent petitions to British royalty. Two Indigenous leaders—the Haudenosaunee chief Deskaheh and the Maori prophet T. W. Rātana—even appealed to the League of Nations for recognition, in 1923 and 1924, respectively. But before the Second World War Indigenous people appealed to international audiences only as representatives of local groups. To understand the origins of a global Indigenous identity, we need to turn to the activist networks that formed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. And this means turning to George Manuel.

Born in 1921 in the Shuswap territory of British Columbia, Manuel started to think seriously about a global Indigenous identity in 1971. He was then the president of the National Indian Brotherhood, a young organization representing Canada’s two hundred and fifty thousand officially recognized “status Indians.” When the Canadian government arranged for a delegation to go to the South Pacific to learn about the Maoris’ place in New Zealand, Manuel was invited along as the representative of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

The start of the trip was frustrating. Like a tourist visiting North Korea, Manuel was whisked from one exhibition to another, presented with a Shangri-La fantasy of the Maori experience. Yet he was determined to escape the spectacle and, when given a chance, he invited Maori politicians and a troupe of Maori entertainers to his hotel room for an honest chat.

By this point, Manuel was fluent in the politics of Canada’s First Nations. As he told the Yukon newspaper the Whitehorse Daily later that year, “We want to maintain our special status, our special rights, and we want to go deeper and find evidence to prove we have special rights as the original inhabitants.” What struck him about his unofficial tour was that the Maori were engaged in the same struggle. They, too, were an Indigenous people fighting a white Commonwealth nation for land, representation, and cultural survival: “What we are doing here in Canada is a part of a world wide movement for cultural autonomy and aboriginal rights of native people.”

From New Zealand, Manuel travelled to northern Australia, where he encountered even fiercer assimilation campaigns. When invited to talk to an assembly of Aboriginal students, he condemned Australian paternalism and told the students to “be proud you are dark. We have every reason to be as proud as the white man. And maybe more.” He pointed to their shared persecution: “Just as much as the Maoris and Aborigines, the Indian people in Canada are dark people in a White Commonwealth.”

The trip stirred up dreams of a conference that would set the stage for “some more lasting institution.” In October, 1975, the vision materialized. Delegates from nineteen countries—almost all in the Americas or Oceania; none from Africa or Asia—met on the Tseshaht reservation, on Vancouver Island, where they founded the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. Manuel was elected the first president. In the lead-up to the conference, attendees decided not to call themselves “Aboriginal people” and went instead with “Indigenous people,” defined partly as people “who are descendants of the earliest populations living in the area and who do not, as a group, control the national government of the countries within which they live.”

The expansion of indigeneity is visible in the history of the World Council, and then in the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which was founded in 1982, and—in part because it benefitted from more regular meetings, the resources of the U.N., and the promise of drafting international law—effectively supplanted the council. Across two decades, the working group metamorphosed from an overwhelmingly American assemblage into an international one. At its first meeting, all but one of the ten Indigenous groups represented were from the Americas; in 1984, Asians started showing up, and in 1989 Parkipuny opened the floor for Africans.

The process had its hiccups. The Cuban diplomat who served as a Special Rapporteur for the group in the nineteen-nineties, Miguel Alfonso Martínez, insisted that Asians and Africans could not qualify as Indigenous. Delegates felt otherwise; they sought a truly transnational identity. But, after years of debate, they decided that no objective definition was possible. Even the World Council’s stipulation that an Indigenous people didn’t control the national government wasn’t quite on target. On the one hand, the Icelanders, who haven’t been considered Indigenous, were for a period under the absolute rule of a Danish king. On the other hand, the U.N. deems the Samoans to be Indigenous, and yet they are the dominant social, cultural, and political group of Samoa.

The U.N., in its 2021 report on the “State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples,” determined that eighty-six per cent of them live in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Who’s entitled to the status remains a subject of contention. Hmong people living in Minnesota send delegates to the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, in New York; Dalits in India, the Roma in Eastern Europe, and Christians in Saudi Arabia remain, for the most part, outside the circle of indigeneity. Identifying which criteria are at play is tricky, but anthropologists and social theorists like Adam Kuper and André Béteille argue that our concept of indigeneity is bound up with outdated ideas about so-called primitive peoples. The tropes persist; we have merely replaced one set of terms for another. Even if you are not aboriginal, you can count as Indigenous if you come across as simple, egalitarian, culturally encapsulated, spiritually attuned to nature, and somehow isolated from history and civilization.

When Parkipuny appeared in Geneva, the Maasai were well established as emblems of “primitive” Africa. With spears, shields, and stretched earlobes, they adorned postcards, documentaries, travelogues, and coffee-table books. You’d see a stoic, ochre-coated man wearing an ostrich-feather headdress like a lion’s mane, or a woman with a shaved head staring at the camera, her neck lost amid beaded necklaces. Almost always, the Maasai were pictured draped in bold red fabric, a shocking burst of fire in landscapes of brown and green. (Photographers relieve them of their sunglasses and watches.)

For decades, the Tanzanian government exploited this imagery. As tourism and big-game hunting flourished, photographs of the Maasai decorated brochures and guidebooks: human scenery garnishing Africa’s untamed wilderness. At the same time, government officials sought to justify the expropriation of Maasai land for more lucrative projects, like wildlife tourism. Pastoralism and conservation were incompatible, the party line suggested; maintaining one image of wildness (the pristine, wildebeest-filled grassland) justified an attack on the other (the Stone Age cattle herder).

Parkipuny reclaimed the imagery of primitivism using the language of indigeneity. Soon after returning from Geneva, he co-founded the first Maasai N.G.O., calling it Korongoro Integrated People Oriented to Conservation, or kipoc, which means “we will recover” in the Maasai language. In a document for donors, the organization explained that the “indigenous minority nationalities” in Tanzania had “maintained the fabric of their culture.” Rather than being respected, however, they were “looked down at, as backward and evolutionary relics,” and denied access to services like education. The Maasai crusade was thus “part of the global struggle of indigenous peoples to restore respect to their rights, cultural identity and to the land of their birth.”

The rhetoric was effective. Two Dutch organizations promptly sent money for facilities, salaries, and operating expenses. In 1994, Parkipuny helped establish an umbrella organization, pingos (Pastoralists and Indigenous Peoples N.G.O.s) Forum, that advocated for Tanzania’s pastoralists and hunter-gatherers as Indigenous Africans. Yet, even as international groups rallied behind him, Parkipuny found growing resistance, sometimes violent, from his fellow-Tanzanians. The reason was not just his role as an advocate of Maasai interests. In the book “Becoming Maasai, Becoming Indigenous” (2011), Hodgson showed that another Maasai organization, Inyuat e Maa, aroused far less resistance. The domestic opposition that Parkipuny encountered partly reflected his style, which many Maasai found combative. But it also likely stemmed from his insistence on indigeneity, which was seen as promoting “tribalism”—something Tanzania wanted to avoid. Aware of events in neighboring countries like Kenya, the government feared that ethnic mobilization could invite insurgent violence and economic instability.

Organizing on the basis of indigeneity hindered interethnic coalition-building, too. Other ethnic groups saw indigeneity as something the Maasai exploited to funnel money and attention toward themselves. At a pingos meeting in 2000, there were impassioned complaints that pingos, supposedly acting for all of Tanzania’s pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, was really a Maasai oligarchy. As a Maasai activist and lawyer admitted to Hodgson half a decade later, “One problem with ‘indigenous’ is that everyone who hears it thinks ‘Maasai.’ So it worked at the national level to limit rather than expand our possible alliances and collaborations.” By the time he spoke to Hodgson, he and many other Maasai activists had largely dropped the rhetoric of indigeneity: “Now we focus on building alliances with the nation, not with international actors.”

A politics built around indigeneity, many organizers fear, can reify ethnic boundaries. It encourages people to justify why their ethnic group, and not another, deserves particular resources and accommodations. It weakens domestic ties, which are otherwise critical for oppressed minorities. But it also contributes to one of the stranger consequences arising from a rhetoric of indigeneity: its co-option by far-right nationalists. As peoples like the Maasai have lost confidence in the rhetoric, ethnic nationalists worldwide have come to embrace it. Writing for a Hindu Right propaganda Web site in 2020, a columnist observed, “In the game of woke, we Hindus actually hold all possible cards. We are people of color. We come from an indigenous culture that is different from the organized religions. . . . How could we not be winning every argument?”

In 1987, two years before Parkipuny’s historic speech at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, five delegates from India landed in Geneva for the group’s annual meeting. They represented the newly established Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, and were led by figures such as Professor Ram Dayal Munda, a linguist with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Their goal was to establish the indigeneity of India’s “tribal” communities, also known as Adivasis.

The delegates’ arguments followed a decades-long discussion about Adivasi identity. At the time of India’s independence, in 1947, people disagreed on how to think about the communities inhabiting the country’s hills and forests. The Indian sociologist G. S. Ghurye declared them to be “backward Hindus.” Mahatma Gandhi considered them a peasant caste to be integrated into the nation. Yet the English-born anthropologist Verrier Elwin, starting in the nineteen-thirties and forties, favored an account that was both idealized and soaked in primitivist imagery. He imagined Adivasis to be the inverse of modernity: free, primordial, attuned to the rhythms of nature. The image appealed to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and the conception has stuck. To this day, the Indian government defines “Scheduled Tribes”—an official designation that, for many Indians, is largely equivalent to the Sanskrit-derived term Adivasi—based on five criteria: “(i) indications of primitive traits, (ii) distinctive culture, (iii) geographical isolation, (iv) shyness of contact with the community at large, and (v) backwardness.”

Given these associations, it is not surprising that the international community, including the U.N. and the International Labor Organization, has embraced the Adivasis as Indigenous. In some instances, indigeneity has paid off. In 2014, with the help of Amnesty International and Survival International, the Dongria Kondh community, in eastern India, temporarily blocked the U.K.-based company Vedanta Resources from mining the Niyamgiri hills for bauxite.

Yet there is also what the anthropologist Alpa Shah calls a “dark side of indigeneity.” Between 1999 and 2008, she spent some thirty months living with Adivasis, mostly of the Munda ethnic group, in the Indian state of Jharkhand. Her book “In the Shadows of the State” (2010) offers a sobering picture of how activism organized around indigeneity can trap the communities it is supposed to liberate.

Many of the problems start with image management. To secure their status as Indigenous, Adivasis have needed to look tribal and non-modern. Urban activists necessarily endorse images of them as children of the forest. The resulting policies can be a boost for activists, intent on building domestic and international platforms. But they can also lead to what Shah calls “eco-incarceration,” reinforcing Adivasis’ marginalization. Consider their elephant issue. In one year, in a village of about five hundred and fifty people, Shah saw elephants destroy five houses. They devoured crops. They kicked a woman, leaving her with serious back injuries. Nearby villages were similarly terrorized, with nine people trampled to death.

The Mundas were not happy. They told Shah they wanted to chop down trees to stop the elephant incursion, but government policy, ostensibly aimed at helping them preserve their traditions, prohibited them from doing so. When she asked how they could survive without the jungle, many Mundas told her that she had it backward. They remembered a past when they cleared the trees rather than living surrounded by them. “After all, not so long ago there were no elephants here because there was no forest,” one villager told her.

Eco-incarceration goes beyond exposing Mundas to elephant attacks. Soon after arriving in India, Shah found Indigenous-rights activists pushing for anti-migration laws that would prevent Adivasis from taking factory jobs in neighboring states. The activists justified the restrictions with paternalistic language, claiming (no doubt with some truth) that factories were economically and sexually exploitative. But the proposed solution ignored the many reasons Adivasis have for leaving, like escaping repressive home environments. In the past several decades, thousands of Adivasis have joined militant insurgent groups, in large part, Shah argues in her new book, “Nightmarch,” because guerrillas treat them as equals, rather than as savages. Devoted to the image of happy Adivasis living at one with nature, urban activists end up denying them dignity and basic freedoms.

This isn’t to say that people who enact tribal caricatures necessarily chafe at doing so. In “Adivasi Art and Activism,” Alice Tilche, who worked with Adivasis at a “tribal museum” in Gujarat, reports that many took pride in primitivist performances. Others treated the dress-up as a kind of job, necessary for securing the benefits set aside for Scheduled Tribes. One Adivasi saw it as a professional obligation that he didn’t mind complying with: “Like policemen wear their uniforms—that’s what we wear.”

Still, there’s something troubling when advocates and patrons urge their putative beneficiaries to perform Victorian daydreams. As an anthropologist who works in remote parts of South America and Southeast Asia, I have seen how the primitivist ideologies connected to indigeneity can breed resentment. On a recent field trip to Colombia’s eastern rain forests, I asked a Huottüja teacher what he thought about the word “indigenous” (indígena). He said that he knew it only as “a word of discrimination”—something that implied his people were “savage, like wild animals.”

On July 4, 2009, Maasai pastoralists in the Loliondo area of Tanzania awoke to police officers and security forces demanding that they leave their villages. Hundreds of people and thousands of cattle were evicted. Over the next two days, the police harassed and jailed Maasai who grazed cattle in the area. When Maasai leaders refused to send their people away, the police burned as many as a hundred and fifty homesteads. In total, some ten thousand pastoralists were affected by the evictions.

The reason for the expulsions was wildlife tourism. Since the early nineteen-nineties, the Tanzanian government has leased hunting rights to the Otterlo Business Corporation (sometimes spelled Ortello), a U.A.E.-based company set up for Gulf élites who want to frolic in the Tanzanian wilderness. The Maasai kept their land rights but usually stayed away during the few months when sheikhs and millionaires arrived. In 2009, however, one of the harshest droughts in recent memory forced pastoralists to scout out grass and water in Loliondo just as the Dubai royals were supposed to arrive.

“The Maasai is good for a tourist’s photograph, useful to carry your bags to the camp, or even to guide you to see the animals,” Parkipuny told the Guardian at the time. “But in the end the animals are far more valuable than people.”

The evictions, combined with government plans to seize fifteen hundred square kilometres of Maasai land for the Emiratis, sparked a new wave of activism. Twenty thousand Maasai—more than a quarter of the population of Loliondo—turned out to protest. Three thousand women gathered and met with traditional and elected leaders. The Maasai of Loliondo contacted leaders and N.G.O.s from five districts with significant Maasai populations, mobilizing close to two hundred thousand citizens who threatened to abandon the ruling political party. In July and August, 2013, a delegation of eighty-nine Maasai travelled to Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma, where they demanded that the government reverse its decision. More than ninety students from the University of Dar es Salaam joined them.

In “Selling the Serengeti” (2016), the geographer Benjamin Gardner observed that this activism differed from the indigeneity-centered organizing that preceded it. Instead, “this movement was largely based on the idea that the Tanzanian state was unfairly persecuting Tanzanian citizens, specifically Tanzanian villagers who happened to be Maasai.”

Did the new approach work? In September, 2013, the Tanzanian Prime Minister said that the government would halt its plan to seize the land. Yet four years later there was a new wave of evictions, in which some hundred and eighty-five homesteads were torched and around sixty-eight hundred people left homeless. Finally, in 2022, a commissioner said that the government would continue the plan of setting aside land for wildlife—resulting, Maasai leaders say, in the dislocation of seventy thousand people.

Parkipuny died in July, 2013, amid the evictions. A Facebook page honoring him is bedecked with comments in Swahili like “Tutakukumbuka daima Baba” (“We will always remember you, Father”). With the newest wave of displacement, his daughter Yassi Moringe recalled, “everyone, especially the elder people, said, ‘Oh, they are taking us out of Maasailand because Parkipuny is not there.’ Everybody was saying, ‘I wish Parkipuny was here.’ ”

In a way, the evictions have brought him back. Indigeneity has reëntered Maasai activism. In April, 2022, thousands of Maasai signed a letter calling on “human rights organizations, media and other citizens who value Indigenous human rights” to oppose the Tanzanian government’s evictions and other actions against the Maasai. The word “Indigenous” appears nine times in the short letter, with two references to the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. “We Maasai Indigenous community are appealing for international support so that our land and our rights are respected,” the letter urged.

Indigeneity is a project of hope. It was crafted by enterprising activists over years of strategizing, absorbing ideas from Red Power, Third Worldism, African and Asian anti-colonialism, and the environmental movement. With it, people sought a politics of the oppressed, aiming to protect land and sovereignty, to turn “backward” natives into respected stewards. When indigeneity promised to deliver on these goals, by attracting the support of international organizations, the natural temptation was to stretch the concept until it covered as many disempowered peoples as possible, even at the cost of coherence.

And incoherence, of course, was an invitation to all those discredited stereotypes. Although the temptation is to fault the brokers of indigeneity—the N.G.O.s, politicians, academics, and urban activists who have promoted its ever-widening application—the resurrection of primitiveness is just as much a testament to the stickiness of a trope. The idea of the primordial savage is appealing. A symbol of everything modernity is not, it serves as a foil for decrying civilization’s corruption or for celebrating its achievements. But we cannot escape the colonial inheritance when we insist on summoning its ghosts. ♦