Indigeneity in Asia: an emerging but contested concept

Abstract

This introduction presents background information about some of the ways that the concept of indigenous peoples is emerging but is also being contested in Asia. Indeed, many governments in Asia accept that there are indigenous peoples in the world, but claim that the concept does not apply to them due to a relative lack of European settler colonization in the continent. This is why many governments of Asia signed onto the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, but with the understanding that UNDRIP does not apply to them. This has become known as ‘the salt-water theory’ or the ‘Asian controversy’. This special issue includes five articles that variously consider the ways that the concept of indigeneity is being deployed in various parts of Asia, including Cambodia, Myanmar, and Nepal, and also transnationally between Thailand, Myanmar, China and Laos; and between Cambodia, Vietnam and the United States.

Keywords:

• indigeneity
• indigenous peoples
• ethnicity
• colonized peoples
• United Nations
• Cambodia
• Myanmar
• Nepal
• Thailand
• China
• Laos
• Vietnam

Over the last few decades, the concept of ‘Indigenous Peoples’ has become increasingly recognized and influential globally. This has especially been the case since 2007 when nation-state members of the United Nations overwhelmingly voted to adopt the ‘United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ (UNDRIP), a resolution without much teeth but nevertheless extremely symbolically important.¹ Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States initially refused to sign, but later all separately reconsidered and endorsed UNDRIP.

Crucially, however, indigeneity does not mean the same thing to everyone. The particular social, cultural, political, and historical contexts of different places greatly influence the ways that indigeneity is being conceptualized and practiced. The modern concept of indigenous peoples is well established in some parts of the world, but not so in others. While it is relatively clear who should be considered indigenous in the parts of the world subjected to significant levels of European settler colonization, including the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, the concept is much fuzzier in other parts of the world. In Asia and Africa, for example, many national governments recognize the existence of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, but not in their own countries, where citizens are either all recognized as indigenous to the country, or none are. This idea has become known as the ‘salt-water theory.’² That is, the leaders of many Asian countries believe that the concept of indigeneity is valid in countries subjected to high levels of European settler colonization (in other words, people who crossed salt-waters as colonizers from Europe), but most of Asia did not experience large amounts of European settler immigration, and therefore the concept of indigeneity is considered to be irrelevant for them, since virtually all the citizens of their countries are of Asian descent. Crucially, this understanding of how the concept of indigeneity does not apply to them allowed many governments in Asia to endorse UNDRIP, but without believing that it actually applies to them. Benedict Kingsbury has referred to the ambiguity regarding who is indigenous and who is not as ‘the Asian Controversy’.³

Nevertheless, over the last few decades, a number of governments in Asia have begun to variously recognize the existence of indigenous peoples in their own countries. These include the Philippines, Nepal, Cambodia, Japan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan). In other countries in Asia, where governments continue to deny the relevance of the concept of indigeneity, various movements in support of the concept of indigenous peoples have emerged and expanded in recent years.⁴ This includes the establishment of new civil society organizations in support of indigenous peoples at local, national, and regional levels. One of the most significant regional organizations is the Asian Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), a non-government organization (NGO) that promotes the concept of indigeneity throughout Asia, and has a secretariat based in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

The ways that indigeneity is conceptualized in Asia has changed significantly, thus leading to some confusion. In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, during the European colonial era, the term ‘indigenous’ was used to distinguish between European colonizers and non-European ‘natives.’⁵ This use dominated in Asia even during the 1960s and 1970s, until the new global concept of indigeneity began to being advocated for through various networks. This new concept initially emphasized the idea that indigenous peoples are ‘first peoples’ or ‘original peoples’ associated with particular places. Indeed, this remains the most commonly recognized conceptualization of indigeneity in Asia. However, Andrew Gray, the former head of the Danish indigenous-support NGO, the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs, proposed a new way of conceptualizing indigeneity in Asia, one that has since been adopted by many indigenous activists in Asia. He recognized that many of the most persecuted ethnic minorities in Asia are not actually the ‘first peoples’ to the places where they presently live. Many were, however, forced to migrate to these new places. Therefore, he proposed that the indigenous peoples in Asia be considered to be ‘colonized peoples’, or peoples who have been oppressed by other ethnic groups over history, rather than simply ‘first peoples’.⁶ For example, significant numbers of ethnic Hmong people mainly migrated to Thailand over a century ago from China via Vietnam and Laos, so they are certainly not the first inhabitants of northern Thailand. However, it can be reasonably argued that the Hmong were oppressed in China and therefore migrated south to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, where they were further oppressed by national governments and European colonial powers. This history of oppression qualifies the Hmong as indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, at least according to some.⁷

On 20–21 March, 2015 the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the United States, organized a workshop with the financial support from the Open Society Foundations. Titled ‘Indigeneity in Southeast Asia’, we were able to support a number of people from different countries in Southeast Asia to participate in this workshop. In addition, some academics with a particular interest in the topic in the United States also participated. During this two-day workshop, participants presented their work and discussed a wide variety of issues associated with indigeneity in Asia. We also visited the Menominee Nation in northern Wisconsin to discuss the concept of indigeneity as well as various other issues with American Indians. A number of papers on various aspects of indigeneity in Asia came out of the workshop, and two special journal issues are presently being prepared. The five articles included in this special issue of Asian Ethnicity constitutes the first, and all contributions address some of the various ways that the concept of indigeneity is being conceptualized and deployed in Asia. A second special issue is presently under review by the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.

All five of the articles in this special issue deal with the emerging concept of indigeneity in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia, but also in South and East Asia as well. The first three are authored by (1) Ian Baird (me), a male white Canadian associate professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, (2) Ardeth Thawnghmung, a Burma-born ethnic Karen female professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and (3) Dinesh Paudel, a male Nepal-born assistant professor of sustainable development at Appalachian State University in North Carolina of the United States. All three authors critically assess the concept of indigeneity in particular contexts in Asia.

In the first of the three, I examine the way indigenous peoples are classified in Cambodia since the concept of indigeneity was first legally recognized in Cambodia in the 2001 Land Law. I ask a provocative question about whether the ethnic Lao people of northeastern Cambodia should be considered to officially be ‘indigenous peoples’ in Cambodia, along with other Mon-Khmer and Austronesian-language-speaking groups, such as the Tampuan, Jarai, Brao, Kreung, Kavet, Lun, Bunong, Kuy, Stieng, etc., which are already legally recognized as indigenous to the country.

In the second article, Thawnghmung considers the serious upheaval in Myanmar (Burma) related to the Rohingyas peoples in northwestern Myanmar, near the border with Bangladesh, demonstrating that contestation related to indigeneity is crucial for understanding the positionalities associated with the conflict. Looking specifically at how discourses linked to history and indigeneity have emerged, she illustrates how both the Rohingyas and the ethnic Rakhine peoples have attempted to employ particular arguments related to being indigenous in order to legitimize their respective positions in relation to whether the Rohingyas (or the Bengalis as the Rakhine call them) should be entitled to full citizenship in Myanmar.

In the third article, Dinesh Paudel takes a critical look at the concept of indigeneity as it has recently emerged in Nepal. He traces the history of peasant struggles, and links the rise of the indigenous movement in Nepal to political shifts associated with the Maoist communist revolution in the country. In particular, he argues that notions of indigeneity and identity politics in Nepal have reinforced elite domination by depoliticizing ethnic peasant politics.

The fourth article examines another way that the concept of indigeneity is being developed, through the emergence of transnational movements, including connections between Bunong in Cambodia and Vietnam. Although the article is authored by Neal Keating, a white male American-Canadian associate professor of anthropology at the College of Brockport, State University of New York (SUNY), it is crucially informed by an important collaboration between Keating, Pheap Sochea, an ethnic Bunong man from Mondolkiri Province, Cambodia, and another young Bunong man, Glan Bubong, who was born in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, but now lives in North Carolina, in the United States. This collaboration started before the workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in March 2015, but continued during the workshop, where Keating, Pheap, and Bubong all presented.

The fifth and final article, co-authored by Micah Morton, a visiting anthropology professor at Le Moyne College in the United States, JianhuaWang (Aryoeq Nyawrbyeivq), an anthropologist at the Yunnan Provincial Institute for Ethnic Studies, Yunnan Minzu University, Kunming, China, and Haiying Li (Miqsawr Pyawqganr), of the Mekong Akha Network, based in the United States. Morton, a white American, is married to Li, an Akha woman from China, and Wang is also ethnic Akha from China. Moreover, Li is related to Wang. She also did her Master’s degree in Chiang Mai University studying Akha religious change in Thailand, while Morton completed his doctoral research on Akha transnational identity politics. Moreover, Wang’s wife is an indigenous Akha activist from northern Thailand. In this article, Morton, Wang, and Li look at transnational connections and indigeneity, examining the particular circumstances of certain Akha in Thailand, China, Laos, and Myanmar. The authors’ unique positionalities give them important ‘insider’ perspectives into this emerging and important issue. They demonstrate how certain Akha have maintained connections over space and national borders by way of their ‘intimate place-making cosmographies’, whereby non-Akha space is reconfigured as a microcosmic totality of a larger Akha cosmos. They argue that these place-making practices, referred to as a form of ‘mobile indigeneity’, complicate conventional understandings of indigeneity by anchoring it not in any particular place per se where a group may reside at present but rather a set of dynamic practices.

Ultimately, all five articles fit together well, since each speaks to the complexities associated with ethnic identities, indigeneity, politics, and nation states and national borders in particular contexts in various parts of Asia. Ultimately, the concept of indigeneity has both the potential to empower those previously oppressed⁸ and also to bring on unexpected radical othering and even, on the extreme end of the spectrum, genocidal acts of killing, as Tania Murray Li has documented in Borneo, Indonesia.⁹ Other scholars, such as Adam Kuper, have fully rejected the concept of indigeneity, claiming that it constitutes a step backwards by implying a ‘return of the native’.¹⁰ Instead, the view of Bengt Karlsson seems more persuasive. He writes, when discussing indigenous rights, ‘Where does this leave us? Assertions of indigenousness come in different forms, and being in favour of some need not imply that one is not horrified by others.’¹¹ Indeed, as all five articles indicate, while it would be inappropriate to simply uncritically accept the concept of indigeneity in all cases, it would be equally wrong to simply reject the concept of indigeneity, as it has the potential to help address the serious and frequent injustices inflicted against indigenous peoples over history.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the authors of the papers included in this collection, including Neal Keating, Ardeth Thawnghmung, Dinesh Paudel, Micah Morton, Jianhua Wang, and Haiying Li, and also to Pheap Sochea and Glan Bubong for their contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Special thanks to Open Society Foundations for funding the workshop at UW-Madison that eventually led to the production to the special journal issue that this short piece is intended to introduce.

Notes on contributors

Ian G. Baird

Ian G. Baird is presently an associate professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published widely about indigeneity, ethnicity, and the political ecology of large-scale plantation land concessions and the development of big hydropower dams. He does most of his research in Laos, Thailand, and northeastern Cambodia.

Notes

1. Crawhall, “Africa and the UN Declaration”; Erni, The Concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asia; Wright et al., “Developments and Challengesto the UN Declaration.”

2. Erni, The Concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asia; Baird, “The Construction of ‘Indigenous Peoples’.”

3. Kingsbury, “Indigenous Peoples International Law.”

4. Erni, The Concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asia.

5. Baird, “Translocal Assemblages and the Concept of.”

6. Gray, “The Indigenous Movement in Asia.”

7. Baird, “Translocal Assemblages and Concept of.”

8. Erni, The Concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asia; Baird, “Translocal Assemblages and Concept of.”

9. Li, “Ethnic Cleansing, Recursive Knowledge.”

10. Kuper, “The Return of the Native.”

11. Karlsson, “Anthropology and the ‘Indigenous Slot’.”