1Indigeneity—the character of being indigenous to or having been formed in a specific place—has been elevated to a political category of action used by certain populations, thenceforth defined as “Indigenous”, to reclaim part or all of the lands they have been excluded from by progressive despoiling throughout the course of history. In proclaiming themselves Indigenous, these populations are first and foremost claiming historical precedence within a given area, thereby legitimizing the right of access to and enjoyment of this area and even claiming ownership of it. Very often, as in the USA [Frantz, 1999], Canada [Usher et al., 1992], or the French overseas region of New Caledonia [Saussol, 1979], dispossession processes became materialized in the form of reservations, serving to confine local communities, with the real goal being to “open” their lands to agricultural expansion, and more generally, to appropriate them. Later, various land ownership reforms and public policies aggravated these situations, and it is only more recently that measures have been introduced here and there to reverse the mechanism, featuring various processes to hand back certain portions of the claimed territories. This latest trend, however, owes nothing to chance, nor to the kind-heartedness of the governments on whom the affected populations depend.
2The many and lively indigenous mobilizations we have seen over the last few decades, be they local, national, or international, have effectively given these people an audience, and to a certain extent they have been heard by authorities like the United Nations Organization (UN) or the International Labour Organization (ILO). These bodies not only recognize the existence of “Indigenous peoples” but have also drawn up a charter of associated rights [Bellier et al., 2017], and this has not been without consequence on the internal relations governments maintain with these populations. It is however worth noting that the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the UN in 2007, offers no clear definition of indigeneity. The UN upholds the principle of self-identification as the main parameter in identifying Indigenous peoples. This broad definition has led to many groups who have been victims of different forms of exclusion and vulnerability—not just those who have been consigned to reservations and seen their lands colonized—also claiming the status of “Indigenous peoples” whenever they form a culturally distinct and politically dominated sub-population inside their country. Indigeneity therefore appears to be quite supple in character.
3Governments are however not always keen to address these groups’ claims and try to limit the Indigenous category accordingly when defining it in their legislation. Moreover, it is commonplace for these definitions to be static and stereotyped, preventing their adaptation to certain dynamics these populations are faced with today, notably relating to mobility issues [Kukutai & Taylor, 2012]. That is the kind of challenge faced when considering, for example, Indigenous living in cities who have outnumbered the on-reserve Indigenous population in certain countries, a fact whose recognition is not always a foregone conclusion [Comat, 2012]. Certain governments therefore prefer other terms or expressions to “Indigenous peoples” or even simply dismiss it as an issue.
4These questions of identification can notably be answered by census-type surveys with the methods they propose for measuring Indigenous populations. The terms and criteria used in these population censuses often say a lot about a country’s willingness, or lack thereof, to afford a distinction to “Indigenous peoples” [Peters, 2011]. These choices, which can vary from one country to the next or even one census to the next, often give rise to haphazard estimates and difficult comparisons. Laws passed on Indigenous populations and their rights are another indicator of choices made in the recognition of indigeneity. These are indeed often tied to legislative measures governing indigenous ownership issues, access to lands and resources and ultimately the “right to territory”, whose provisions are seldom satisfactory on all points. Incompleteness, constraints, or rigidity in legal frameworks can put the onus back on Indigenous to prove to the courts their effective, continuous occupation of dispossessed territories, which in the best of cases leads to a case law ruling in their favour.
5So what outcome can we see for these different ways of evaluating and defining indigeneity? Importantly, how do these choices inform the stance and arguments of groups affected by or claiming conformity to these set definitions? How, among other questions, do these choices translate to public policy as applied to Indigenous populations, i.e., “indigenous policies”? How are these policies and the identity recognition methods underpinning them enacted in space? To what extent do they influence the spatialization of Indigenous populations? From the other side’s viewpoint, what strategies are available to affected groups for overcoming limitations thrown up by these recognition modes? What agency do they afford and what territorial innovations result from them? Those are the questions addressed in the twelve papers presented in this issue of Espace Populations Sociétés, together with a book review prepared by Olivier Marinos on the subject of songspirals of Yolŋu women in Australia.
- 1 This issue of Espace Populations Sociétés was produced in the scope of the INDIGEO project (2016-20 (...)
- 2 This more classic approach to demogeography applied to Indigenous populations has notably been used (...)
6Continuing on from a first compilation of papers published in 2012 in this journal on the ways of tackling Indigenous population matters from a geographical perspective, the call for papers leading to this issue invited thoughts on the geographical issues raised by questions of identification, visibility, and recognition of these populations1. Those are questions that, although not strictly speaking core to population geography as applied to indigenous demogeographic realities2, are an obvious corollary thereto, linked to a more cultural and political approach of geography. What is at stake here is to understand how the demographic dynamics of Indigenous populations can be conceived and dealt with—be it well or ill advisedly—at political level and possibly become issues of conflict.
7The first prerequisite to measure Indigenous populations is acknowledgement of their existence, whence their identification criteria can be defined and their contours plotted, a task that is neither simple nor neutral. Further down the line, it can also involve establishing and acknowledging certain rights of these populations, notably land ownership but also access to some basic services (healthcare, housing, etc.), as well as political rights. Papers published in this issue aim at analysing—each in their own way and based on diverse contexts—the geographical baselines resulting from these different forms of recognition, along with the response in terms of actions and strategies that they can stir in the target populations. Taken together, they give an extended vision of the Indigenous population issue in line with a cultural and political approach to demogeography. This issue of Espace Populations Sociétés thus sets out to sketch a panorama of this subject in a certain way that could be qualified as a “cultural and political geography of the Indigenous population”, based on reflections obtained from a variety of geographical, cultural and political contexts.
- 3 This issue has relatively good coverage of all world regions where the status of “Indigenous people (...)
8The twelve papers compiled herein tackle some extremely diverse national and regional contexts, from Argentina to the Russian Federation, Canada to Bangladesh, by way of Southeast Asia, Mexico, Australia—and elsewhere3. As well as this diversity of areas, the origin of the authors is also very diverse, and they are not necessarily writing about realities concerning their own country. A third of them are involved with French institutions, while others are from countries like Germany, the USA, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. All these aspects, although factual, give this issue an indisputably International and even bilingual dimension, with half the texts written in French and half in English.
9It is also important to mention the richness and usefulness of the analyses provided in this issue of Espace Populations Sociétés. The articles received fit very well into the various sections that were put forward in the call for papers on which this issue is built, with input involving both original contributions and complementary perspectives. Some of them even provide responses that cut across several themes and could have been inserted in any or all of the three sections forming the structure of this dossier, whose contents are described in detail below.
10All identification processes inevitably generate exclusion in terms of the criteria put forward for evaluating what constitutes an individual or a group. Differences arising in the characterization of Indigenous populations by the sitting powers and by the Indigenous themselves can lead to suppression or invisibility when a country ignores them. While some Indigenous peoples may define their own criteria when the country they are in denies them recognition, omissions, oversights, silences, or absences may remain in countries that advance certain criteria in their approach to indigeneity. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) once suggested “statistics is the art of lying with precision.” Is this true of the identification processes of Indigenous populations? What meaning can we give to the shortcomings which come to light in the measurements, censuses, data, and studies attached to this subject?
11Special attention is paid in the first part of this issue to criteria put forward, or conversely discarded, when defining, characterizing, and measuring Indigenous populations. Which criteria get the nod? How are they assembled and why? What indicators fall by the wayside? What reasons and what ideas do the powers-that-be give for either confining these populations to oblivion or acknowledging them? Defining and identifying Indigenous populations also challenges the use and validity of a unique and homogenizing category at international and national levels. Research and fieldwork on this subject show quite clearly that these populations are rich in diversity, with different cultures and beliefs and varying practices. Is being happy with quantifiable criteria a sufficient footing for revealing this richness—and if so, how can it be promoted?
12In the opening paper of this compilation, Gail Fondahl, Viktoriya Filippova, and Antonina Savvinova critically analyse the choices made in these criteria in the scope of the recently implemented federal register of Indigenous persons in Russia. As they explain, respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples is a principle enshrined in the 1993 Russian Federation Constitution, which seeks to match modern international standards on the subject. Furthermore, an Act came into effect in 1999 that recognizes and defines what in practice are the rights of the officially designated “Indigenous numerically small peoples”, mostly concentrated in the North, Siberia and the Far East. The federal register of Indigenous persons was drawn up to formalize the status of the entitled “beneficiaries”—and thus in order to enforce their rights. To sum up, the 1999 Act defines the rights of Indigenous peoples whereas the register says who benefits from them.
13It is therefore the fundamental issue of determining who is and who is not Indigenous that this register is designed for, in response to the need to define indigeneity from a legal/administrative or even technocratic point of view that could be qualified as “functional”. To this end, the authors align their discussion on more of a methodological approach, questioning how, concretely, the State goes about defining these identities to mark out their contours and say what tools are available. The conclusion of this analysis is that such a definition relies on three fundamental criteria that bear as much relation to the places and lifestyles of Indigenous individuals and collectives as they do to the principle of self-identification. Although place and lifestyle criteria can seem quite objective on first sight, they are in fact especially problematic. First, because they link indigeneity to so-called “traditional” lifestyles that many cannot or no longer want to exercise; then, to the need for these lifestyles to take place in territories that are also considered “traditional”, but from which many individuals have been pushed out directly or indirectly by various processes over the course of history.
14The risks involved in reducing indigeneity to the essentials has of course been pointed out by many Indigenous leaders from Russia who see this as a manoeuvre to drastically limit the potential number of “beneficiaries” of the now-established rights. This deliberation on the use and limits of a register of Indigenous persons in Russia thus lends weight—if any were needed—to the idea that the recognition afforded by certain States to Indigenous populations is the fruit of an arbitrary and discriminatory process in the very way that indigeneity is defined. What stands out clearly from the Russian example is that in places where the “Indigenous people” category is officially established, it can end up in practice being tied to specific areas, which to a certain degree marks the exclusion or even the relegation of the groups thereby “recognized”. This means that first and foremost, or even exclusively, a person is Indigenous because she / he lives in or locates to a place where indigeneity is arbitrarily assigned and nowhere else.
15This socio-spatial dichotomy is indeed so deeply anchored in the understanding of indigeneity that it becomes hard to imagine the existence of Indigenous peoples in lands or regions whose socio-spatial configuration is not the result of settler colonialism. That is the problem Ian Baird addresses in his paper on Southeast Asia, where as he states “there was plenty of European colonialism, but much less white settler colonization.” In such circumstances, how can indigeneity be conceived and defined? What is the basis for recognizing or denying the existence of Indigenous peoples? Rather than seeking to answer these questions or simply assessing the relevance of the “Indigenous people” category in Southeast Asia, the author strives to show how certain local population groups, by appropriating and claiming this status, provoke de facto reconceptualization and rethinking about what indigeneity includes.
16In contexts where the great majority of a country enjoys rightful claim to the status of “first inhabitant”, he shows that the category “Indigenous people” can be encroached on by groups chased from their original lands and suffering certain forms of marginalization and vulnerability, who can be considered “historically oppressed ethnic minorities”. He thus postulates that the Southeast Asian experiences of indigeneity are the start of a partial detachment of both the spatial—“originating from a given territory” —and time-related—“being its oldest inhabitants”—dimensions inherent to this category. Several Asian countries nevertheless resist this more “open” definition of indigeneity and the consequent recognition of the existence of Indigenous peoples in their midst. Ian Baird explains their adhesion to the so-called “saltwater theory”, whereby the concept of indigeneity is relevant only to countries subjected to high levels of settler colonization from across the oceans—implicitly from Europe.
17The following paper by Paul Nicolas supplies a concrete illustration of this through the case of Bangladesh, which the author points out had its ambassador declare to the United Nations in 2012 that “Bangladesh does not have any Indigenous populations.” Actually, in that country as in several other Asian countries, such populations are at best officially labelled “ethnic minorities”, which does not stop certain of them, like the Jumma, claiming the status of “Indigenous people”. Paul Nicolas explains in his contribution that this process is indissociably linked to the wave after wave of marginalization and invisibilization suffered by the Jumma in the Chittagong Hill Tracts: (1) first by the British colonial power, who reserved a large part of the region’s forests for timber exploitation, (2) next by the Pakistani government, which built and commissioned the Kaptaï hydroelectric dam that flooded 40% of the Jumma’s cultivable lands, (3) then finally by the Bangladeshi regime, who decided to migrate Bengali settlers there, forming a population almost equal in number to the Jumma. That is the context that eventually got the Jumma mobilized in an attempt to push back the Bengali settlers, ending in military intervention to secure and occupy the terrain in a war that lasted two decades from 1977 to 1997.
18The author demonstrates that this context above all others is what stimulated the ethnic groups of the Chittagong Hill Tracts to build their indigeneity:
The Jumma have built this common identity to unite them in opposition to the Bengalis, making them a minority whose frame of reference is a territory, the Hill Tracts, that they must protect from external invasion. Their experience of land colonization by Bengalis and especially war have strengthened the feeling of shared history among the Jumma ethnic groups, who after suffering a common ordeal in the dispossession of their lands now see them as a territory to defend (our translation).
19Just like the Jumma, many peoples in many other places have in some way “become” Indigenous, no matter whether this identity has been officially recognized or not. But what Paul Nicolas also emphasizes in regard to the specific Jumma experience is the fundamental role played by international arena and organizations like the UN, from whom groups claiming indigeneity draw a certain amount of legitimacy, and through whom they then try to pressurize the governments to whom their demands are made. Although such mechanisms can be observed pretty much anywhere, they do of course take on a greater meaning and gather more impetus in national contexts like that of Bangladesh, where the “Indigenous people” category is not recognized.
20Nothing however is set in stone: matters can sometimes progress thanks to pressure exerted by Indigenous leaders through the UN bodies, or by the groups at their own level choosing strategies to avoid or bypass denial of their indigenous status and the rights arising therefrom. That is what Fabio Santos sets out to demonstrate in his analysis of the migration undertaken by a group of Kaliña people from French Guyana or “Guyane” to the neighbouring Brazilian State of Amapa in the 1940s.
- 4 In Guyane, recognition of the indigenous rights did eventually gain traction through arrangements a (...)
21This migration came in the wake of Guyane’s change in status, in 1946, to a French Overseas Department—Département d’outre-mer. For Amerindians, this change heralded the acquisition of full French citizenship and the same rights in theory as the whole French population, but there was a catch: the French republican model could not recognize the collective rights of specific groups without its being seen as a departure from the constitutional principles of indivisibility, equality, and non-discrimination. As Fabio Santos explains, escaping that limitation was at least partly why the Kaliña he refers to in his study began the migratory process that took them to Brazil, then considered as “the country of real Indians”. At the time, unlike in France where there was no prospect of any kind of recognition of Indigenous populations, Brazil’s Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (Indian protection department) was already up and running, and this was the mechanism that thirty years later gave the Kaliña land ownership rights that France would surely not have recognized had they stayed in Guyane4.
22It is worth pointing out that the UN had only just been created and the fate of Indigenous peoples was not yet on its agenda. Although the Kaliña’s bypass strategy of migration to set up home in Amapa can then be considered a success, Fabio Santos nonetheless points out the downside of the situation. France and Brazil had very different capabilities for ensuring equal access to certain fundamental rights, e.g., healthcare coverage, for all citizens irrespective of their origin or social conditions. In that sense, the accounts of Kaliña women descended from the migrants to Brazil, on whom he bases his analysis, highlight the difficulty of their life courses, fraught with pitfalls.
23Without trying to interpret any kind of ideological position, we can read quite clearly between the lines in these women’s accounts and see their frustration today as simple Brazilian citizens who now do not enjoy as many rights as their relatives who stayed in Guyane. These counter-narratives of the Kaliña migration to Amapa are a reminder that the recognition of collective rights, such as indigenous rights, although an essential democratic issue, is no substitute for the general rights each country is supposed to bestow on its citizens; a logical dilemma to which Indigenous peoples everywhere are exposed being simple citizens on one hand and Indigenous on the other.
24Fabio Santos’s paper challenges this logical dilemma and the way both individual and collective rights evolve in time and space on either side of an international border, which constitutes its main input in this section of the special issue. But inasmuch as it also emphasizes, in fine, the incidence such situations can have on indigenous territoriality, this paper could just as well have gone into the next section, which tackles the geographies arising from forms of identification of Indigenous populations.
25Every process that sets out to identify or ignore Indigenous populations becomes a sensitive issue as soon as territorial matters are openly or implicitly raised. Giving these populations visibility sooner or later involves defining an anchor point, a land or a place of belonging. This second part of the issue therefore sets out to interrogate the geographies arising from these identification processes. For Indigenous peoples, identification can also be a burden. Having been victims in the past of resettlement, rejection, confinement, placed in exclusion areas called reservations, many of them refuse censuses and are wary of any attempt to measure them. These forced relocations have often been coupled to very violent assimilation measures.
26Current indigenous quest for identification is unerringly linked to claims to recover or reassert part or all of their historical lands. Over and above the characterization of the geographies resulting from formal Indigenous population identification processes, the papers compiled in this section give a fuller picture of the multiple and complex realities of indigenous territories. The sources of these realities are on one hand the communities or groups located in what remains of their traditional lands after being whittled away over the course of history, who demand retrocession or reappropriation, and on the other hand the growing number of Indigenous taking root in new areas outside their original territories. Indigenous territories are diversifying because the realities of these populations are also diversifying, making the question of their identification and recognition even more complex.
27As a prelude to these considerations, Émilie Crémin’s paper on the Mising territorial claims in India illustrates the symbolic character that can be ascribed to the recognition of a special status for Indigenous peoples in some national contexts. The author goes on to explain that India was probably one of the earliest countries to recognize such a status because it was already a reality during British colonial rule, when “highlands populated by ‘tribes’ practising shamanic religions” were separated from “plains populated by inhabitants from the Hindu and Islamic worlds” (our translation). Once India gained independence, these populations, whom the colonial administration had officially designated “hill tribes”, were entered in a common register as Scheduled Tribes.
28This status, while intended to afford protection, also put them at the bottom of Indian society, governed by varna-jati, the caste system. This subordination was accompanied by a form of spatial exclusion, assigning the Scheduled Tribes to the country’s north-eastern highland regions. It therefore came as no great surprise that in India, as Émilie Crémin points out, indigeneity is associated with populations being considered “isolated outsiders, backward compared with the rest of the world”. India however does not have a monopoly on this prismatic view of Indigenous populations and the lands they occupy as “backward” and “isolated”. This conception of indigeneity also permeates other societies, such as Australia where according to Sarah Prout Quicke Aboriginal spaces and lifestyles have been shelved into the “remote Australia” category.
29Officialized by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) early this century, this category is an ideological construction historically anchored in the Australian imaginary, whereby indigeneity is measured by the distance—be it geographical, social, cultural, or other—that Aboriginal communities maintain vis-à-vis the main urban areas that have constituted the country’s nerve centre as well as the nuclei from which colonization radiated. According to the author’s meticulous analysis, remoteness refers here to a colonial concept of confining and symbolically distancing Aboriginal peoples and communities from “civilization”; in other words a form of exclusion and marginalization of Indigenous peoples.
30In Australia, as well as in India and many other countries, remote regions associated with indigeneity “naturally” became the focal point of public policies directed at the Indigenous world. It is indeed there and seldom elsewhere that Indigenous peoples and communities can hope for a recognition of specific rights, notably land rights. Nonetheless, for a number of reasons often linked to the evolution of socio-political processes and/or to the specific paths taken by locally concerned groups, there is no guarantee that “Indigenous people” status comes with any rights attached. In the example of India, Émilie Crémin points out that the attribution of autonomous territories that began in the 1990s still has not, shall we say, “touched” the Mising, who have been advancing their claim since the 1970s. And the naturalization in the near future of “illegal Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian immigrants who had been subject to persecution in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan prior to 2014, amounting to a possible 2 million people in Assam” (our translation), could further complicate the Mising objective.
31In Australia, other reasons intervene in the forms under which territorial recognition is afforded to Aboriginal communities. As Sarah Prout Quicke explains, since the late 1990s, public policy has tended to favour settlement forms that group and aggregate the Aboriginal communities of “remote Australia”, thereby reducing the number of such communities in order to rationalize coverage and the provision of services in the goal of limiting cost to the public. Such a process seems however to be in direct opposition to the “geographical evidence” showed by the study of Aboriginal territorialities, distribution patterns, and mobility forms.
32Indeed, Aboriginal population is not specifically concentrated in supposedly “remote” Australia which, thanks to kinship networks and intensive circulation of individuals, appears as very well connected to many other places that are also home to Aboriginal communities. This ubiquity or omnipresence has driven Sarah Prout Quicke to propose reconsidering indigenous migration in Australia as a form of “circular migration” or indeed “non-migration”, since resettlement is never one-way or final but follows a perpetual cycle. Public policy struggles to recognize and secure or even imagine such a relationship with the land!
33The question of recognizing indigenous land rights can prove so complex that certain countries sometimes resort to ploys that appear to be in favour of these rights when in fact they are only a means of sidestepping them. The next paper, in which Brad Coombes critically analyses the recent process for attributing personhood to nature in Aotearoa/New-Zealand, is a good example of this kind of manoeuvre. In his reflections, based on the case of Te Urewera National Park which was assigned personhood in 2014 by the New Zealand authorities, he states that the rights bestowed on this entity have somehow become a “filter” for those of the local Maori tribes, whose demand for restitution of lands has been “drowned” in the emergence of a new legal construct that ties their future to that of nature. Not only does such a construct sidestep the question of Indigenous peoples’ rights; it helps reduce them to “the state of nature”, while engraining what the author calls “a future of non-development”.
34The government is on a winner here: it saves face by bowing to the increasing sensitivity of public opinion in environmental matters while accommodating a widespread idea that conflates Indigenous peoples with nature. This gives the impression of respecting both the rights of nature and those of its so-called “guardians”. Two birds with one stone! While fostering a “progressivist” image, the government manages to disarm the Maori on whom is imposed this new form of environmental governance, sabotaging their demand for restitution of a land that can no longer be recognized as theirs or transferred because it has become an entity with its own rights.
35The result of this, according to Brad Coombes, is a reinforcement of what he calls the tautological principle of recognition, by which the State, “as perpetrator of historical violence”, paradoxically becomes “arbitrator of resolution mechanisms in the present”, thus providing “only for a cultural right-to-be”. Such a process furthermore runs against trends observed just about everywhere in the world over the last two decades, aimed at getting Indigenous peoples more involved in the management of protected areas with various forms of joint administration [Herrmann & Thibault, 2016; Stevens, 2014]. The author goes so far as to assert that it is purely and simply a renewed, original form of heritage in the same vein as the preservationist paradigm of wilderness that played such a large part in dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands, large stretches of which have often been “showcased” in the form of National Parks.
36Partly because of their attempt to overturn this paradigm to gain recognition over their ancestral lands, Indigenous peoples have found themselves right back in the costume of the “ecological native” that Astrid Ulloa [2005] depicted. It is easy to see this as a kind of “territorial stigma” that binds Indigenous peoples to the characteristics of their lands as envisioned by collective imaginaries: spaces that have barely felt the effects of anthropic activity, inhabited by “technically limited societies” who live “in harmony” with nature. As Brad Coombes explains, this essentialist representation of their identity has helped lock Indigenous peoples to “a future of non-development”. They are constrained to be and remain “ecologists by nature”, virtually forbidding their coming forward in any other guise than that of symbiosis with, and adaptation to the natural environment in which they live and evolve.
37Marine Duc, in her contribution, shows how “territorial stigma” results from a process whereby common representations of a given place are assigned to individuals or groups of individuals who come from those places. These people are then endowed ipso facto with certain preconceived cultural or social traits. Moreover, the negative connotation of the term “stigma” lies in the indirect reference to the various forms of discrimination that then succeed, affecting all those involved. That is what the author analyses here, taking up the manner in which these stigmas help forge the indigenous identity—the indigeneity—of Inuit youths migrating from Greenland to Denmark, ostensibly on a temporary basis to pursue their studies. Her paper dwells on the fact that indigeneity does not only arise through the political (re)positioning of activist groups fighting socio-spatial injustices but also through a socio-dynamic process “that recomposes itself according to the context, and a logic of race and class as well as in the change in people’s personal paths” (our translation).
38Indigeneity therefore does not just owe its existence and awareness to the image Indigenous peoples set for themselves. Nor does it only depend on official policies for recognizing their identities and rights. It also relies on the way these collectives are perceived by other components of the societies in which they are inserted. These perceptions, per the exacting analysis in Marine Duc’s case study, can be partly forged or influenced by representations circulating on indigenous lands. In this particular case, the author distinguishes two “differentiation regimes” based on the representations of Greenland found in Danish society. The first one she qualifies as “primitiveness”, with Greenland perceived as a primitive region; the other, “pathology”, from which stems the racism and discrimination that Greenland students feel to be the target of. She asserts that “the role played by the region of origin can well be seen as the production medium of a difference-driven hierarchy: it enables unspoken racialization” (our translation).
39In helping understand different modes of production of indigeneity, this paper reveals yet another facet of its emergence, “by the land”, largely fuelled by ignorance of the modern identities and lifestyles of Indigenous populations. This other facet of the production of indigeneity also rears its head implicitly in several other papers in this compilation, notably Sarah Prout Quicke’s, which questions the shoehorning of the aboriginal identity into this so-called “remote” region considered the heart of an indigeneity that necessarily translates as backwardness, disconnection, strangeness. This vision, recurrent as it is, remains firmly founded on a reductive colonial imaginary that still seems to guide how indigeneity is conceived and produced worldwide.
40As Marine Duc points out, “the invisibilization of discreditable attributes”, or more simply, the concealing of one’s ethnic identity, is a circumvention strategy that the young Indigenous she interviewed admitted to for avoiding the stigmas that hinder their attempts to negotiate acceptance into Danish society. This form of reflective protection, involving the hiding of identities, can certainly be observed in many other contexts. The papers in the third and last part of this compilation, however, suggest that this is only one weapon of many in an armoury that also includes quite opposite actions, actively revealing, asserting and acknowledging, rather than concealing indigenous identities.
41In addition to certain countries’ acknowledgement (or not) of a standard definition of indigeneity or “Indigenous peoples”, there is also the question of how these populations recognize themselves, present themselves, and rely on specific traits for appearing on the public stage or inside their own communities. Differences or disjunctions between the criteria put forward by the States and by the Indigenous populations in their approach to what indigeneity means can generate claims, protests, and conflicts in which each stakeholder uses or manipulates these criteria to defend their position and develop their arguments. Laying claim to lands and the resources they contain then mark the desire of Indigenous peoples to gain socio-cultural visibility.
42The multiple uses to which the Indigenous people category can be put thus relate back to identity strategies and an existential and/or political vision of the territory. The more parties there are involved in tackling the characterization of indigeneity, the more issues there are: countries and the executive arms of the governments, Indigenous peoples with their own organizations, national, regional, and local NGOs, international scale organizations including the UN and ILO. With such a diversity of interested parties, it is no wonder there are so many positions taken.
43While the use of the expression “Indigenous peoples” by the Indigenous themselves aims for asserting they have collective rights, many countries are not going to stand for that, as we saw from the analyses in the two previous sections. What stance should the Indigenous therefore take? How do they identify themselves and get themselves identified, make themselves heard and have their existence acknowledged in many and various spatial realities? How, finally, can they contest the geographies imposed on them?
44In the first paper of this section, Samuel Jouault analyses the process by which the Maya have appropriated tourist activity in the hinterland of the Mexican State of Yucatan. He reframes and contextualizes this process in regard to the seaside tourist development that has been going on for several decades on the coastal stretch from Cancún to the Riviera Maya. He also shows how the Maya’s takeover of their own development has alleviated some of their economic dependence on seaside tourism, which employs them as cheap unskilled labour. In achieving this, Maya tourist entrepreneurs are not only managing to restore the balance of power relations in which they have historically been the dominated party, but they are also managing to throw off the cloak of invisibility in which seaside tourism wrapped them.
45Developing tourist activity on one’s own lands thus becomes a means for the Maya to re-establish their existence in the eyes of tourists and of society in general by making themselves seen the way they want to be seen. It is in the reconciliation between the Maya of past—encapsulated in the archaeological remains—and the contemporary Maya that the question asked by the author in the title of his contribution gathers meaning: “(So) Where are the Maya?”, to which he replies that the “new tourist map” that has been taking shape in the Maya hinterland “refocuses on places and people that are long gone.” Apart from helping them combat the racism they are subject to in modern Mexico, tourism simply allows the Maya to exist and better protect their lands.
46Following on from this paper, Serge Marek’s contribution puts forward several points of view that show how Indigenous’ strategies for territorial reappropriation cover much more than only preserving or recovering “traditional” lands. As Serge Marek suggests, these strategies also take place in cities, which have historically been the nucleus and bridgehead of colonization processes. In this regard, the author focuses more specifically on the forms of integration and establishment in the urban space by the Maori of Aotearoa/New-Zealand, with the setting-up of maraes which are traditional meeting grounds forming a space in which Maori can express their spirituality or hold socio-cultural interactions. The emergence of these spaces, he explains, has modified both the physiognomy and the nature of cities in a perspective he qualifies as “Indigenous existentialism”, which puts the Maori as actors of their own future rather than victims of a colonial past.
47Continuing on from this article, the paper by Alberto Preci, Pierre Gautreau, and Bernard Tallet shows how urban areas, in addition to being practised and assimilated by Indigenous peoples, have now become the nerve centre of their present-day political activism and of a reconquering process of their traditional lands. The authors more specifically analyse the visibilization/invisibilization processes of the Wichi in Argentina, which was historically constructed and idealized as a “white country” and a pure product of European colonization. Using an innovative decoding key based on the notion of “visibility regimes”, they explain that a first regime, called “forest mobility”, was followed by a second regime, called “settlement”. These regimes have in turn contributed to keeping the Wichi invisible, first because their mobility deprived them of any form of recognized land ownership in a territory considered “empty”, then because of their partial settlement in urban areas accompanied by the fairly classical idea—although obviously false—that they were doomed to lose their identity by acculturation.
48Not only has this acculturation not happened, but a third regime, one of “multi-localization”, is evolving and currently increasing the Wichi’s visibility even further, as demonstrated by the authors in their contribution. In a context marked by an expanding agro-pastoral frontier in their historical land, the Wichi are mobilizing forces in urban areas, where they are succeeding in forging alliances, not to directly defend their lands, but more subtly the forest, which is disappearing before people’s eyes and in the context of which they are (again) becoming first-line activists. Capitalizing on the ”environmentalization” of their combat and the networking of the different places they practise in, this third regime is giving the Wichi an undisputable visibility, in and by way of space.
49Étienne Rivard, in the last article of this section, also tackles the role that space can play in the visibilization and recognition of indigenous identities. Focusing on the Métis people of Canada, he evokes the difficulties encountered by some communities living outside the land formally recognized to the Métis Nation, which has been located in the prairie provinces of the Canadian West. These outsiders find it an uphill struggle to achieve recognition of their indigenous identity and enjoy their rights as such. The author deals with the specific case of Métis communities implanted in Quebec who are engaged in a legal battle with the courts, who challenge them to provide evidence that the Métis identity exists outside of the land where the dominant narrative—shared by Canadian government and institutions—traditionally places it.
50The geohistorical analysis of Métis territorialities on a local scale that Étienne Rivard offers, based on a cross section of documentary sources and various archives from which “the fabric of community relations” can be reassembled, provides such evidence in what he qualifies as “indirect proof”. The State and its institutions nonetheless maintain a conspicuously performative role with respect to indigeneity, by simultaneously reifying and/or exacerbating certain collective identities, and eclipsing others. Which leads the author to conclude that “the Métis of the East, to a great extent, are invisible only because they have escaped recognition” (our translation). But this invisibilization, as he goes on to show, is not always inevitable: it is the result of, to a greater or lesser degree, a political act that although arbitrary is certainly not irreversible!
51By placing the notions of identification, visibility, and recognition in an interrogative context, the title of this issue puts doubts in one’s mind about how identified and visible are Indigenous populations, if at all? By invoking the word recognition, we furthermore invite the idea that these populations might not be recognized. This is the case in many of the world’s countries, especially in Asia where even the very term Indigenous is taboo. In other places, through a long series of half-measures, these populations have won the right to exist, often linked to the land. For a very long time and even today, identification, invisibility, and recognition under very strict control if it exists at all have been orchestrated by the colonial powers and postcolonial powers-that-be.
52Indigenous people on the other hand have had no difficulty identifying themselves and recognizing each other, and least of all making themselves visible to one another. But with westernization of the world and the advent of imperialist powers, these populations became totally disavowed and rejected. It is in that context, one of extreme brutality leaving its mark on the mind and flesh of many Indigenous, that very selective policies of “visibilization”, of identification and of recognition were implemented. These policies completely bypassed those whom, in certain countries like Canada, the settlers called “savages”. These “savages” who seldom drew a line between space and time and had ontologies rich with living human and non-human beings alike found themselves driven out of their lands by settlers and their descendants.
53In such an oppressive context, identification could never be anything but conditional, and worse still, incomplete, unfair, and even contemptuous. Visibilization could only happen at the cost of maintaining some invisibility, that of the stigmas attached to most of these peoples we now call Indigenous. The issue for the powers-that-be was knowing what could be given visibility, what could be recognized, and to what extent, even in paternalistic approaches. Another objective was to cover up the misdeeds of these discriminatory colonial and postcolonial policies.
- 5 The Choctaw are an Amerindian people from the US South (Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana).
54Author Louis Owens, who was partly of Choctaw5 descent, spoke of the extermination and brutality suffered by his people. In his novel The Sharpest Sight, one of the characters muses, “You know grandson, us Choctaws signed nine treaties with the government, smoking the pipe nine times, and everytime it’s just like this book. The white man comes riding to the surface on an Indian’s coffin.” [Owens, 1994: 124]. Certain peoples have even been eliminated to the point of total disappearance, like the Beothuk in the east of Canada. The Seediq people in Taiwan were pillaged, humiliated, and massacred by the occupying Japanese in the 1930s, as explained by graphic novelist Row-Long Chiu [2011]. Through his actions in favour of this people, Row-Long Chiu is one of those who contributed to the institution of the Seediq as the 14th aboriginal ethnic group in the Republic of China in 2008.
55Whatever the case, the brutality and social injustice dealt out to Indigenous peoples often prevents their appearing as their real selves or their idea of themselves. The genocidal and ethnocidal processes these communities have experienced have left them deeply destabilized. The stigmas of this brutality persist from generation to generation. In the wake of these traumatisms, difficulties in everyday living and deep discontent become triggers for waves of suicide among pre-adolescents and adolescents [Eades, 2015]. Innu author Naomi Fontaine writes about this individual and collective distress:
I wish these things were easier to say, to recite, to put down on paper, hoping for nothing but to be understood. But who wants to read words like drug, incest, alcohol, solitude, suicide, dud cheques, rape? I’m struggling and I haven’t even said anything yet. Haven’t I spoken about anybody? I daren’t. [Fontaine, 2011: 9, our translation].
- 6 Not so long ago, certain countries would send Indigenous children to residential schools to teach t (...)
56In writing about this extreme disarray and the dangerous or even desperate behaviour of a young Maori, New Zealander author Ted Dawe was rewarded with a temporary ban in his own country on the sales of his novel Into the River [Dawe, 2012]. It is not an easy task to expose the different realities of Indigenous everyday life and have an audience that acknowledge the suffering therein. Inuk throat singer, artist, and author Tanya Tagaq dedicated her novel Split Tooth to “missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and residential school survivors6” [Tagaq, 2018: 7]. In her account, the POV character, a young adolescent, does some soul searching:
My mother never speaks to me in Inuktitut any more. Residential schools have beaten the Inuktitut out of this town in the name of progress, in the name of decency. Everyone wanted to move forward. Move forward with God, with money, with white skin, and without the shaman’s way. It made me wonder what I was not being taught […]. Butane is my drug of choice these days. It’s great to get an actual high instead of the pretend one that we get from rolling up oregano and pretending it’s weed… [Tagaq, 2018: 59 and 67].
57Giving serious thought to the geographical issues of identification, visibility, and recognition of Indigenous populations is a duty, an obligation to not obliterate this very peculiar context, and what we could call a geography of disdain and social brutality. Finding themselves in an area of rejection, reclusion, exclusion is the common fate of Indigenous peoples. The places assigned to them because of their social destitution are almost always removed from or at best on the fringe of mainstream society. For decades, ruling elites from distant places have dominated and domesticated so-called ‘inferior races’ by conditioning their reflexes, Frantz Fanon [1961] tells us.
58With a good number of them refusing to be evicted from and hand over their territory, these “savages” are becoming organized. They challenge their excluded condition, construct claims for access to the land they see as ancestral, to enjoy their rights like any other citizen and to keep their culture firmly alive. We hear them proclaiming their own identity, clamouring to be visible, fighting to be recognized. In answer to the brutality and disdain of the colonial and postcolonial ruling classes comes the echo of radicalist indigenous movements [Smith, 1999]. In this arm-wrestle, each camp defends its own interests vehemently but with different forces. The powerful ones who control the decisions are in the first camp while the other camp are pawns on the political chessboard, or sometimes not even squares.
59As Indigenous leaders speak out more loudly, the powers-that-be sometimes leave the door ajar for new so-called recognition measures in the hope that these concessions will lead to a reconciliation policy. Often, what the powers like to advertise as the granting of new rights in compensation for previous wrongdoings takes a long time to implement and not without difficulty, producing only limited effects. Some Indigenous leaders are quick to denounce this recognition as a new avatar of colonialism [Arthur Manuel & Grand Chief Derrickson, 2015].
60Faced with the oppressed, who do not have a lot going for them, governments can brandish the narrowest opening as radical change or improvement even when that is far from the real case. Indigenous peoples, despite everything, have not gone away. They are still there standing up for themselves, attempting to foil any political manipulations hidden behind their “visibilization” or recognition. Whatever the case in point, these populations appear as forces for contestation and proposition and after years of struggle are gradually gaining international recognition, notably in the scope of the UN, at a time when their territories and living places are diversifying. New identities and identifications are appearing, renewing the visibility issue, notably in urban areas.
61In many countries, the three key words in this issue of Espace Populations Sociétés go far beyond the scope of debates in academic circles. These subjects are dealt with in the media, but also in films, music, painting, literature, and even cartoons; and more and more of these authors and artists are Indigenous themselves, as some of the references quoted in this introduction testify. Showing and saying what one is, on one’s own, through all kinds of expressive means, also contributes to the visibility of indigenous cultures.