We Are (Are We?) All Indigenous Here, and Other Claims about Space, Place, and Belonging in Asia

Abstract

vi Editors’ Introduction Charlotte Eubanks and Pasang Yangjee Sherpa We Are (Are We?) All Indigenous Here, and Other Claims about Space, Place, and Belonging in Asia What is indigenous about Asian Indigeneity?1 A decade after the adoptionoftheUnitedNationsDeclarationontheRightsofIndigenousPeoples (UNDRIP) by the General Assembly, the UNDRIP notion of Indigeneity has proved quite mobile, interfacing with a wide variety of groups through organizational forums such as the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and regional interlocutors like the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact Foundation (AIPP), based in Thailand, and Asian Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Network, based in India. Dominant globally circulating notions pertaining to Indigeneity (perhaps exemplified most strongly in the UNDRIP) constellate around issues of recognition. Assuming a structural condition of oppression vis-­à-­vis majority ethnic groups and the surrounding state apparatus, this rights-­ oriented framework assumes (and then advocates on behalf of) tight connections between specific territorial units (lands, rivers, mountains, forests) and specific cultural units (Indigenous Peoples and their distinct social, political, cultural, economic, linguistic, and spiritual systems). Deeply influenced by the legal apologetics of settler colonial states toward displaced Native, First Nations, and Aboriginal peoples, however, this notion of Indigeneity—­ at once largely modern, Western, and neoliberal—­meshes imperfectly with autochthonous conceptions of Indigeneity as articulated in a wide variety of Asian contexts. This special issue presents such articulations to reveal the complicated ways in which peoples have deployed the term Indigenous in its various forms. Indigeneity is “out there” (Karlsson 2003, 416), and like many other social categories, it is a contingent, interactive, and historical product Editors’ Introduction vii (Merlan 2009, 319). In Asia since the 1970s and 1980s, concepts of Indigeneity have been “linked to emancipatory political objectives associated with assisting oppressed peoples; not only those colonized by Europeans, but also others subjected to various forms of domination by Asians living in close proximity” have emerged and become popularized rather than linking to the notions of “first peoples” or “original peoples” (Baird 2015, 54). It is also the case that in some situations, as with Tibetans, who have their own historical and political landscape to consider, significant uptake of the term Indigenous has not happened (Yeh 2007). More specifically, Tibetans do not currently take part in the international mobilization of Indigenous Peoples (IPs), or what Niezen (2003) calls indigenism (Yeh 2007, 71). “For Tibetans in exile, indigeneity is too weak a political claim. Within Tibet, it is too strong under the current political situation” (Yeh 2007, 71). Indigenous spaces are nevertheless claimed, although many IPs from Asia are not the first peoples in places they currently live (Baird 2016). For example, Morton et al. (2016) show that despite multiple historical experiences of displacement, marginalization, and, more recently, colonization, the Akha minority residing throughout the Upper Mekong Region have maintained their connection with ancestral homeland by way of “intimate place-­making cosmographies.” Through this form of “mobile indigeneities,” the Akha communities recraft “non-­ Akha” spaces where they cannot lay claim to be the first people as a microcosmic totality of the Akha cosmos (580). The Bunong diaspora from Vietnam, as another example, connects with a growing Cambodian Bunong Indigenous rights movement, displaying translocal articulations of Bunong Indigeneity to build cross-­border dialogue in concert with international law regarding the rights of IPs (Keating 2016). Their aim is “a new kind of politics that makes political space for their voices and aspirations to be heard and heeded by states to a meaningful and satisfactory degree” (Keating 2016, 575). Though no less politically invested than UN terminologies keyed to structural violence and reparations, such regional and local terms provide an inventory of texture and distinctiveness, revealing the economics, identitarian stakes, and legal valences of people–­ space relations that may disappear under the singular moniker of “Indigenous.” In India and other parts of South Asia, for instance, a careful probing of the term adivāsi (a twentieth-­ century Sanskrit neologism meaning, literally, “original inhabitant”) reveals a long and complex history of subjugation and “pacification,” beginning in the British imperial era and extending well beyond it, in which certain groups were identified with geographical areas (such as forested uplands) and accorded particular legal treatment...