Indigenous Cultures & Theory

Thousands of communities around the world identify as “indigenous.” In North America, we are perhaps most familiar with Native American and First Nations peoples such as the Cree, Lakota, Diné, Haudenosaunee, and Tlingit, and with Pacific peoples such as the Hawaiians, Fijians, Samoans, and Māori. But the Sámi people of Scandinavia, the Ainu of northern Japan, and multiple “aborigine” peoples in Taiwan and Australia also generally identify as indigenous, as do numerous peoples in South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.

Some indigenous peoples, such as the people of the Kingdom of Tonga, enjoy self-determination as the dominant group within a sovereign UN member state (i.e. an independent country) governing their homelands. Others, such as Native American “tribes” formally recognized by the United States federal government, enjoy a sort of nation-within-the-nation quasi-sovereign status. Some groups are recognized in some other fashion by the national governments under which they live, and receive some form of special considerations or protections; many, meanwhile, are recognized by their national governments only as “ethnicities” or “ethnic minorities” and not as “indigenous,” or are not recognized at all. Some groups are demographic majorities in their homelands, while many are not, and many include significant numbers in diaspora. Some groups maintain native customs, practices, and language, while others are engaged in efforts to revive native culture with varying degrees of difficulty and success. Some groups include activists who fight passionately for indigenous rights for their people while other members of that same community do not identify as “indigenous” at all.

Given these diverse situations all around the world, what does it mean to be “indigenous”? What does indigeneity mean in the East Asian context as opposed to North and South American and Pacific contexts? What do most or all of these peoples have in common that characterizes indigenous identity or experience? And how are indigenous peoples and the struggles they face different from other minorities?

To address these questions and to understand indigenous cultures, struggles, and perspectives as distinct from those of minority cultures more broadly, we must engage with a number of concepts, including:

*Identification as an ethnicity or race vs. identity as a nation or a people
*Indigenous rights, human rights, and international law
*Blood quantum and differing understandings of identity & membership
*Urban indigeneity and indigenous modernities
*Self-determination and indigenous sovereignty
*Settler colonialism and other forms of imperialism / colonialism
*Genocide vs. cultural genocide, epistemicide, erasure
*Native modes of knowledge, and indigenous understandings of relationships with nature, ancestors, and spirits/deities
*Orientalism, scientific racism, and assimilationism
*The history of the study of indigenous peoples, in anthropology and archaeology, their collection by non-Natives, and their display in museums and elsewhere
*Environmental racism
*Land, homeland, and Diaspora

In courses on Indigenous Cultures & Theory, or Indigenous Cultures of East Asia, we will engage with many or all of these concepts as they manifest in and pertain to the histories, cultures, and present-day struggles of particular indigenous peoples in East Asia, the Pacific, and around the world.