The concept of indigeneity is sometimes uncritically lumped together with the concept of ethnicity or even with race. While as analytical categories both ethnicity and indigeneity can be defined as the social and cultural constructions of specific peoples that share certain common traits including ancestry, language, beliefs, values, and so forth, the term indigeneity entails three specific characteristics: first, it implies a shared global identity; second, it is normatively framed by international legislations; and, third, it is tied to the prior occupation of specific lands and territories. In comparison to ethnic nationalisms, for example, indigeneity, as Niezen (2003: 9) claims, has unique global contour:
[Indigeneity] is not a particularized identity but a global one…It sets social groups and networks apart from others in global ‘we-they’ dichotomy. It identifies a boundary of membership and experience that can be crossed only by birth or hard-won international recognition. It links local, primordial sentiments to a universal category.
While there tends to be rivalry between ethnic groups (and many violent examples exist today, especially in contemporary Africa) (ibid.), distinct indigenous peoples, such as the Sami of Finland, the Maori of New Zealand, the Maya of Guatemala and the Sirionó of Bolivia, all self-identify within the unifying category of indigenous peoples. They have collective goals and strategies that they plan and negotiate in international forums and meetings especially within the UN (Brysk 2000; Hodgson 2002; Niezen 2003; Tsing 2007).
This global indigenous movement draws its strength from international legislation on indigenous rights as the term indigeneity is not solely analytical or an expression of identity; it is also a legal category (Niezen 2003: 3), “as coalitions working at the United Nations and elsewhere have made ‘indigenous peoples’ rights’ a part of international customary law” (Bowen 2000: 12). Global standardization of what indigeneity means is cemented in UN declarations such as Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) (1989) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Although the ILO’s Convention 169 explicitly states that its aim is not to establish a fixed definition of indigenous peoples, it does, however, set parameters by which the qualifications of different groups of people are measured in order to define the scale of their indigeneity. The convention (Article 1) concerns:
[P]eoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present state boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions…Self-identification as indigenous…shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion…
Instead of perceiving identities as constantly constructed and performed, discourses of indigeneity have become standardized. The key qualifications attached to indigeneity, therefore, include descent from original peoples of colonized or otherwise occupied lands and territories who, nevertheless, still retain parts of their distinct culture, traditions, and forms of organizing themselves socially, politically, and economically. According to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples (WGIP), any definition of indigenous peoples has to include four criteria: first, priority in time in respect to specific territory; second, cultural distinctiveness; third, self-identification; and, forth, an experience of discrimination, dispossession and marginalization (Kenrick and Lewis 2004: 5).
feature of indigeneity…is the permanent attachment of a group of people to a fixed area of land in a way that marks them as culturally distinct” (2010: 385). Convention 169, for example, states that lands and territories have a special cultural and spiritual value for indigenous peoples. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), on its part, asserts that indigenous peoples everywhere in the world have a “distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories…and other resources”. This cultural distinctiveness gives them certain claims and rights vis-à-vis others in a situation in which the global economy is increasingly threatening their territories and livelihoods. Tsing, indeed, argues that “those communities that have placed high hopes in the international indigenous label do so because their land and resources are threatened by corporate and state expansion” (2007: 36). Indigenous peoples “sought international protection because they were poor and persecuted and because they lacked political access at home” (Brysk 2000: 9). On the basis of their prior occupation of lands and territories, indigenous peoples are entitled to lands, territories, and natural resources in ways that other (ethnic) groups are not (Bowen 2000).
An important goal in the identity politics of social movements and indigenous organizations has been to pinpoint cultural difference and distinguish indigenous peoples from others. A commonly used strategy in this has been to emphasize that, to a certain extent, indigenous peoples worldwide share common traits in worldviews, cosmologies, knowledge, and practices that are distinct from others. All over the world, indigenous “activists draw upon the arguments, idioms, and images supplied by the international indigenous rights movement, especially the claim that indigenous people derive ecologically sound livelihoods from their ancestral lands and possess forms of knowledge and wisdom which are unique and valuable” (Li 2000: 155). What Hodgson (2002) calls ‘strategic essentialism’, the use of particular cultural representations of indigeneity for political purposes, is evident in global indigenous discourses. Initially elaborated by Spivak (1987), the term strategic essentialism implies the idea that in order to get their voices heard it may sometimes be beneficial for marginalized groups, such as women or indigenous groups, to frame their political demands into a simplified cultural discourse. In order for many indigenous groups to qualify as indigenous in global forums, their identities had to be essentialized. These indigenous characteristics included, for example, the “natural” relation to land, respect for nature, value for community traditions, egalitarian relations between community members, and a distinct form of indigenous knowledge. This making of difference has become an important political tool locally and nationally and it enjoys the support of international legislations and conventions on indigenous rights.
Problematic here is that representations of cultural difference have often been translated into truths: they are taken to represent empirical realities of particular local cultures in specific locations, although this “fairly narrow, inflexible definition of [indigeneity]…
may not reflect the present (or future) realities of…indigenous livelihoods and lifestyles” (Hodgson 2002: 1039). To an extent, this essentializing of indigenous peoples derives from nostalgia towards inherently ecological and egalitarian human being that has been lost by modernity, argues Niezen, and continues that because of this romanticization, “indigenous leaders must struggle against a temptation to take both libels and outrageous flattery as the truth about themselves and their peoples” (2003: 11). My empirical analysis of discourses and practices connected to the notion of vivir bien examines how cultural distinctiveness and essentializing indigeneity is constructed through the notion of vivir bien and how they have been brought to serve political purposes (see Chapter Four).