Indigeneity

It is estimated that Indigenous peoples total 476 million, belong to over five thousand ethnocultural groups across up to ninety countries, and speak around four thousand languages. Yet these figures are contested and disputed by self-identified Indigenous peoples, scholars, nation-states, and international agencies. The reason is that the term “Indigenous” (which is capitalized to indicate an equivalence with continental and national designations) has been utilized under colonialism and imperialism and today’s nation-state and geopolitical power relations to identify and “fix” certain populations. States play a key role in defining Indigenous peoples, or indeed intentionally not defining them, and vary in their criteria, categories, and purposes. For this reason, the United Nations definition of Indigenous peoples is not universally adopted. For this reason, geographers utilize the concept of indigeneity alongside that of Indigenous peoples to signal that “being Indigenous”—or being seen to be Indigenous—is always a contextual, power-laden, and contested positionality. The discipline of geography has been the handmaiden of empire and colonialism, with the result that its understandings of and engagement with diverse Indigenous groups has been patchy, drenched in problematic power relations, and founded on profound misunderstandings. Nevertheless, over recent decades, the influence of postcolonial and decolonial geographies, slowly but significantly increased numbers of Indigenous Aboriginal First Nation–Adivasi and other geographers, and a discipline-wide effort to de-essentialize, historicize, and re-frame Indigenous knowledges have shifted our understanding. Nevertheless, geographical discussions and publications on indigeneity capture only a partial sense of Indigenous peoples’ diversity, heterogeneity, and dynamics especially in the English language. Although some 80 percent of Indigenous peoples are in Asia according to some counts, geographical work is primarily focused on Anglophone settler states (North America, Southern Africa, Australia), Latin America, and to some extent in the Arctic north. The term “indio” was first used by Christopher Columbus on arrival in the Americas, and the term (together with terms such as tribe, Aboriginal) traveled worldwide with British, Portuguese, French, American, and other colonial-imperial and neocolonial projects. In addition to being a tax or labor category, indigeneity under colonial-imperial rule was often associated with racial difference, being less than fully human (or adult), and in need of education and civilization. As the works discussed below make clear however, indigeneity shifts its meanings and associations over time and space, but as geographers and Indigenous scholars stress the connection to unequal power, discrimination and profound gulfs in subjectivity characterize Indigenous peoples’ situation. This entry draws on decades of collaborative work with Latin American Indigenous interlocutors. Bibliographic entries below use Indigenous names and, where appropriate, authors’ self-identification, and indigenous/native/aboriginal placenames including Aotearoa New Zealand.