Indigenous Peoples Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Indigenous peoples are often considered synonymous with aboriginal, tribal, or native peoples, and some would characterize the phrase even more broadly. There have been countless attempts to define the term “indigenous peoples,” yet in today’s complex world of interwoven ethnic identities, no one definition has ever been agreed upon. According to the Office of the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, “there are an estimated 300 million indigenous people in more than 70 countries worldwide.” The UN clearly distinguishes “indigenous peoples” from “indigenous people” because the plural form carries a distinct legal meaning according to Article One, which recognizes the “principle of equal rights and self determination of peoples.” The phrase indigenous peoples refers to groups of people who share the same ethnic or tribal identity and who either currently inhabit or are descended from a known geographic area of their home country, often referred to as their ancestral lands. The UN International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs states that: “Today many indigenous peoples are still excluded from society and often even deprived of their rights as equal citizens of a state. Nevertheless they are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity…” The UN also recognizes that indigenous peoples “are descendants of groups which were in the territory of the country at the times when other groups of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived there.”

Indigenous peoples traditionally live in a range of types of societies with varying strategies of adaptation to their environments. Due to a variety of factors, including loss of land to neighboring or dominant societies, most indigenous peoples are no longer able to rely on their traditional methods of subsistence, but in some cases they still adhere to these ways of life when possible. These include:

Foragers (also called hunters and gatherers) lived in small kin-based groups, had nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles organized into bands, and have no formal leader.

Horticulturalists (smale-scale farmers) cultivate crops using only human labor, practice shifting cultivation, and usually belonged to a larger tribe and had a formal or informal leader.

Pastoralists survive primarily on herding animals such as sheep, goats, or cows, are nomadic, and usually belong to a larger tribe with a leader or chief determined by heredity.

Agriculturalists practice farming with the use of animal labor, are sedentary, often practiced irrigation, and have a class or a caste system and one or more leaders or chiefs. Agriculturalists come in a variety of types and political systems. There were even empires comprised of several chiefdoms and required that tribute be paid to their leaders through a centralized system of redistribution.

In the late 1800s and throughout the 1900s, anthropologists traditionally studied indigenous peoples in their homelands throughout the world and the effects that colonization by dominant societies had on their traditional ways of life. Beginning a few centuries earlier, and throughout this period, colonizers-primarily from European countries-attempted to conquer and control indigenous peoples they encountered in their explorations of other continents and islands in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Once most indigenous peoples came into contact with those from an industrialized society, they usually suffered increased disease and deaths. Furthermore, indigenous peoples have been victims of intentional genocide since colonialism began.

Prior to colonization by Europeans, indigenous peoples had their own problems of warfare and conflict, often resulting from similar quests for resources or territories, and also resulting from varying religious beliefs and ongoing feuds. For their part, European colonists justified their control of indigenous peoples because they believed that their model of society was far superior. These indigenous peoples did not cover themselves with as much clothing and did not yet live in an industrial, mechanized world. They were thought to be “primitive” or even “savage.”Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, governments from Europe as well as the United States attempted to control territories occupied by Native Americans and indigenous peoples throughout the world.

As attempts were made to control native peoples, the United States – immersed in civil war and Indian wars – enacted legislation to create the first national parks and later served as an example for other nations interested in so-called “wilderness preservation.” The first parks were Yellowstone (1872) and Yosemite (1890), and were established with grave consequences for indigenous peoples of the areas who were expelled, starved, or burned out of their lands. Thus, the notion of a “protected area” as lands that are not occupied by any humans was embedded into the world’s view of nature preservation and exported from the United States throughout the world. It was further codified as stated in the 1964 U.S. Wilderness Act, which defines wilderness as a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Throughout the 1900s, indigenous peoples throughout the world were evicted from their aboriginal territories to make way for protected area “nature” conservation. As indigenous peoples were forced to leave their traditional territories, policies and treaties in the United States as well as other nations began to establish lands, sometimes known as reservations, where they could live. National governments established agencies to oversee indigenous peoples and some were required or allowed to set up their own tribal governments.

In the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists became interested in the subject of how indigenous peoples adapted to their environments, and researchers in the fields of ecological anthropology, cultural ecology, and ethnoecology realized that many groups of indigenous peoples had in – depth complex knowledge of the natural world that usually exceeded the level of knowledge western scientists had of those same geographic areas. Furthermore, as modernization progressed throughout the world, anthropological field researchers noted that there were many indigenous peoples who were able to survive using traditional small-scale shifting agricultural methods, or efficient hunting and gathering techniques that maintained a generally healthy environment for humans and landscapes. Yet, we also know that indigenous peoples did not always live in harmony with their environment. In fact, some groups of indigenous peoples, such as those called Ancient Pueloans (Anasazi) at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and inhabitants of Easter Island in the Pacific, were found to have overutilized natural resources to the point of causing irreversible environmental degradation and likely contributed to the collapse of their entire society.

In spite of some examples indicating indigenous peoples’ practices as contributing to environmental degradation, a large number of studies found that indigenous peoples had successful adaptations to their environments, as demonstrated by cultural ecologists. These studies coincided with an earlier environmental movement of the 1970s; were later embraced and transformed by a resurgence of environmentalism in the 1990s; and were often a basis for environmentalist representations of indigenous peoples as “ecologically noble savages.” Scholars and advocates have debated the validity and potential harmfulness of the use of this image in indigenous and environmental causes for over a decade. Nonetheless, indigenous peoples at times leverage this romanticized image of themselves as natural stewards of the environment to advocate for land claims and struggles for other human rights and social justice causes.

Indigenous peoples throughout the world continue to be displaced and marginalized due to encroachment of environmental degradation in the areas they occupy. Unfortunately, indigenous peoples also engage in conflicts with each other, especially when resources such as water and land are scarce. Despite some countries’ offering reservations or territories to indigenous peoples, they have consistently had little control over the implementation of laws or policies which grant them territories. Throughout the 1980s and gaining momentum as a result of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, also known as the Earth Summit), indigenous peoples began forming their own nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or working with NGOs established by others to fight for indigenous rights. These organizations participated in a conference parallel to the Earth Summit, called the Global Forum. Despite the creation of some disingenuous NGOs, collectively NGOs have had considerable success in fighting for indigenous rights worldwide. Thousands of NGOs throughout the world have now been created by indigenous peoples. Official tribal organizations have also joined the fight for indigenous rights, including First Nations of Canada, the Navajo Nation of the United States, and the Aboriginal Government of Australia.

Bibliography:

Bodley, Victims of Progress (Mayfield, 1982);
Coates, A Global History of Indigenous Peoples (Palgrafe Macmillan, 2004);
Colchester, “Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas: Rights, Principles and Practice,” Nomadic Peoples (v.7, 2003);
Diamond, Ecological Collapses of Pre-Industrial Societies. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Stanford University, 2000);
Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism, a Global History (Longman, 2000);
Kottak, Anthropology, the Exploration of Human Diversity (McGraw-Hill, 2006);
P. Nadasdy, “Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism,” Ethnohistory (v.52, 2005);
P. Park, Introducing Anthropology, an Integrated Approach (McGraw-Hill, 2006).