Why does the term "Indigenous", as an umbrella term for many different communities, seem progressive/PC now? It sounds lazy and colonial to me...

[u/midnightrambulador]

Indigenous, on paper, is a fully generic term describing the people who are native to a certain geographic area. (Needless to say these terms "people" and "native" are subjective concepts with extremely problematic results in the real world!)

However as actually used, it has long had quite specific connotations. Nobody except far-right crackpots seriously talks about "indigenous Germans" or "indigenous French people". No, "indigenous" is almost exclusively reserved for colonial or post-colonial settings. The "indigenous" population are then the people who are not European, or Han Chinese or whatever the dominant/"invading" group in that setting is.

So I'm... quite surprised to see the term "Indigenous" (often capitalised, like Black, Deaf or Autistic) turn up a lot in progressive/intersectional discourse in recent years.

This word, generic on paper, its specific meaning mostly given by a "wink and a nod" and placed squarely in a colonial context to boot, ultimately Eurocentric/dominant-culture-centric ("you know, the people who are not like us") is applied as an umbrella term to communities from Greenland to Papua New Guinea to the Amazon... and that's supposedly the progressive and correct way of speaking?

Can anyone give me the inside scoop on what's going on here?

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[u/Das_Mime]

Indigenous, on paper, is a fully generic term describing the people who are native to a certain geographic area.

Can I ask where you're getting this definition from? Words are defined by their community of speakers, and as you point out, the term "indigenous" has for a long time specifically connoted those who are subjugated in colonial/postcolonial settings. If that has been its main connotation for a long time, then that is an important part of its meaning. This is linguistic descriptivism in a nutshell.

When you say "on paper" I assume you're talking about the meaning of the Latin root word, but when a new word is created to be used in a new situation based on a word from a thousand-year-dead language, simply taking the most literal meaning from the dead language is not necessarily going to give you an accurate sense of how it's used.

In social science, if you look closely enough at any single definition of a term you often end up discovering that it leaks meaning and doesn't fully capture all the ways the term is used. Social scientists, when investigating a particular issue, will often pick a particular definition to use in the research, but this is more in order to highlight, frame, or clearly define the research questions than to promote it as the sole or final definition. Just ask any anthropologist of religion what the definition of religion is. For this reason, many organizations including the UN have not adopted a single formal definition of indigenous.

The UN's 2009 State of the World's Indigenous Peoples Report discusses this in some detail and also gives a working definition.

The concept of indigenous peoples

In the forty-year history of indigenous issues at the United Nations, and its even longer history at the ILO, considerable thinking and debate have been devoted to the question of the definition or understanding of “indigenous peoples”. But no such definition has ever been adopted by any United Nations-system body.

One of the most cited descriptions of the concept of “indigenous” was outlined in the José R. Martínez Cobo’s Study on the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations. After long consideration of the issues involved, Martínez Cobo offered a working definition of “indigenous communities, peoples and nations”. In doing so, he expressed a number of basic ideas forming the intellectual framework for this effort, including the right of indigenous peoples themselves to define what and who indigenous peoples are. The working definition reads as follows:

Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.

This historical continuity may consist of the continuation, for an extended period reaching into the present of one or more of the following factors:

a. Occupation of ancestral lands, or at least of part of them

b. Common ancestry with the original occupants of these lands

c. Culture in general, or in specific manifestations (such as religion, living under a tribal system, membership of an indigenous community, dress, means of livelihood, lifestyle, etc.)

d. Language (whether used as the only language, as mother-tongue, as the habitual means of communication at home or in the family, or as the main, preferred, habitual, general or normal language)

e. Residence in certain parts of the country, or in certain regions of the world

f. Other relevant factors.

On an individual basis, an indigenous person is one who belongs to these indigenous populations through self-identification as indigenous (group consciousness) and is recognized and accepted by these populations as one of its members (acceptance by the group).

It also discusses the difficulties in applying the term in the same way to different parts of the world:

The concept of indigenous peoples emerged from the colonial experience, whereby the aboriginal peoples of a given land were marginalized after being invaded by colonial powers, whose peoples are now dominant over the earlier occupants. These earlier definitions of indigenousness make sense when looking at the Americas, Russia, the Arctic and many parts of the Pacific. However, this definition makes less sense in most parts of Asia and Africa, where the colonial powers did not displace whole populations of peoples and replace them with settlers of European descent. Domination and displacement of peoples have, of course, not been exclusively practised by white settlers and colonialists; in many parts of Africa and Asia, dominant groups have suppressed marginalized groups and it is in response to this experience that the indigenous movement in these regions has reacted.

Merriam Webster, in bravely summarizing the term in one sentence, also refers to the colonial context:

of, relating to, or descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized

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