You First

What does it mean to be indigenous?

In my early days as a disability rights activist I developed my own guiding principle for labeling people. One of the best-known mottoes of the disability community is “Nothing About Us Without Us!” and that includes the naming of disabilities and the labeling of disabled people.

I’ve adopted the same approach to the naming of other groups of people. I am often asked my opinion on the proper or preferred way of referring to the first peoples of this country. In Canada, that phrase (“First Peoples”) is commonly used, but in the USA, the cloices more commonly include Indian, American Indian, Native, Native American, and indigenous people.

In my own writing and speaking, I have tended to use the last phrase (“indigenous people”). I’ve recently learned another phrase that was cited in the book Covered With Night — “natives and newcomers” — which I think is a clever way to address the naming of both groups (the newcomers being Europeans? settlers? colonists? invaders?).

This naming issue (and much more) is covered in a recent (February 27, 2023) piece in The New Yorker by Manvir Singh, called “You First” in the print edition and It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the “Indigenous” in the online version., and also by the reader responses in the March 20 issue.

I am pretty much in agreement with the tone of the article, and it’s well worth reading for some anecdotal history of the term “indigenous.” I do, however, feel a need to quibble with some of the author’s statements.

The author implies that labeling people “indigenous” is yet another way of “othering” them — overlooking the fact that the people themselves very often choose that label.

He uses “white” and “European” interchangeably, which I find to be objectionable and dangerous. In my own work, I try to avoid any reference to skin color, because that terminology so easily slips into racist language (see my post RACE: Can We Caste It Aside?).

On the positive side, Singh makes a convincing argument that “indigenous” is often equated with “primitive.” Back in the Age of Discovery, this trope was part of the justification for taking over native lands and enslaving native people. The stigma has, to some extent, lived on.

Here in North America, an objective look at many of the indigenous cultures reveals a level of sophistication that would have put the newcomers to shame, if they had brought an open mind instead of their determination for conquest. Many of the problems that plague our present-day dominant culture simply did not exist when Europeans arrived on these shores. Although the native world was not all peaches and cream, for the most part homelessness did not exist, nor did hunger or incarceration.

One of the letters published by The New Yorker provides a nice commentary on this issue:

In Manvir Singh’s consideration of the use of the term “Indigenous,” he is right to point out that the word has often been attached to the idea of primitiveness—an idea associated with racist stereotypes rooted in colonialism (“You First,” February 27th). But, as he also notes, many communities prefer to self-identify as Indigenous in their political activism. Discussions among Indigenous Brazilian peoples in the wake of the recent election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as President are an interesting example of this. Lula’s government initially intended to establish a Ministério dos Povos Originários (best translated as Ministry for Original Peoples), a name chosen to avoid the primitivist stereotyping tied to the word “Indigenous.” The Indigenous peoples of Brazil, however, insisted on replacing “Originários” with “Indígenas,” a more widely recognized and inclusive term.

In short, the article provides some interesting insights into the development of the term “indigenous” — the author, however, makes what is to me a rather incoherent case against using the term. After having had my thoughts provoked, I came to the opposite conclusion.