Chiricahua Apache children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, c. March 1887, an example of forced assimilation into settler-colonist culture
25 November 2020
The word indigenous, at least as it is used to refer to people, has been undergoing a subtle shift in meaning in the last half century or so, a shift that the major dictionaries have not yet caught up with. The word is from the Late Latin indigenus, meaning native to, born in. In its earliest English uses, the word was used as in the Latin. And when referring to plants, animals, and geology, indigenous still means precisely that, native to the region in question.
The earliest English-language use of the word that I’m aware of actually refers to people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Michael Stanhope’s 1632 Cures Without Care is a book about the mineral waters near Knaresborough, Yorkshire, and it uses the phrase indigenous poor people to refer to those born into poverty:
Those who neighbour nearest to these waters, are an indigenous poore people, not able to step out of the roade of their laborious calling, being plaine husbandmen and cottagers, and therefore it cannot be expected they should accommodate them in their many usefull concernments wherein they are most grossely defective.
And a decade or so later, indigenous is used in the context of colonialism. From Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia epidemica:
In many parts thereof it be confessed there bee at present swarmes of Negroes serving under the Spaniard, yet were they all transported from Africa, since the discovery of Columbus, and are not indigenous or proper natives of America.
But it was not exclusively used in the context of colonialism. As late as 1782, Europeans could be referred to as indigenous. From a tract by Samuel Musgrave of that year:
Upon the whole, therefore, we have best reason to conclude, first, that the Greeks in general were an indigenous people, αὐτόχθουες: and, secondly, that their RELIGION and MYTHOLOGY was radically, if not entirely, their own.
The Greek autochthonous is synonymous with indigenous in meaning native to a region, although in current English-language use autochthonous is not generally used to refer to people.
But indigeneity was increasingly tied to race and decreasingly associated with European peoples. In 1790, Bruce James writes of the people of East Africa:
The Ethiopians, who nearly surround Abyssinia are blacker than those of Gingiro, their country hotter, and are like them, an indigenous people that have been, from the beginning, in the same part where they now inhabit.
And by the middle of the twentieth century, indigenous was inextricably contrasted to White settler colonists. For instance, in their 1962 White Settlers in Tropical Africa Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan write of Victorian attitudes to toward Africans, distinguishing the indigenous Blacks from the settler-colonist Whites. Duigan uses indigenous Africans to distinguish from White African settler-colonists in Africa, some of whose families had lived in Africa for centuries:
The indigenous Africans, Europe’s “external proletariat,” were looked upon as being even more licentious and improvident than her “internal proletariat,” the unskilled workers of Manchester, Lille, and Essen; for most Victorians, this was saying a great deal.
And writing in French about the same time in his 1961 Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), Frantz Fanon contrasts indigènes with européennes:
Le monde colonial est un monde compartimenté. Sans doute est-il superflu, sur le plan de la description, de rappeler l'existence de villes indigènes et de villes européennes, d'écoles pour indigènes et d'écoles pour Européens, comme il est superflu de rappeler l’apartheid en Afrique du Sud.
But starting in the 1970s, Indigenous peoples began to organize on a global scale and resisted these earlier senses of indigenous as applied to people that were imposed by a framework established by settler colonists. As an example, a 2004 translation of Fanon’s book into English by Richard Philcox does not use indigenous to translate indigènes, instead using native in quotation marks:
The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of "native" towns and European towns, of schools for "natives" and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa.
Clearly, something had shifted between 1961 and 2004 and indigenous, at least in North American English, no longer simply meant native to a region. Indigeneity no longer was a simple contrast of race or ethnicity. In 2016 J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, a professor of Anthropology and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, writes:
On the flip side, in asserting indigeneity as a category of analysis, the question of its substance always arises. Just as critical race studies scholars insist that race is a useful category that is a distinct social formation rather than a derivative category emerging from class and/or ethnicity, indigeneity is a category of analysis that is distinct from race, ethnicity, and nationality—even as it entails elements of all three of these.
The First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia gives the following definition of indigenous:
The United Nations generally identifies Indigenous groups as autonomous and self-sustaining societies that have faced discrimination, marginalization and assimilation of their cultures and peoples due to the arrival of a larger or more dominant settler population. The word Indigenous was adopted by Aboriginal leaders in the 1970s after the emergence of Indigenous rights movements around the world as a way to identify and unite their communities and represent them in political arenas such as the United Nations. Indigenous was chosen over other terms that leaders felt reflected particular histories and power dynamics, or had been imposed by the colonizers. Given the diversity of Indigenous experience, no universally accepted definition has been drafted.
Indigeneity, because it arises out of a contrast with settler colonists, cannot be separated from the contexts of oppression, marginalization, and forced assimilation in which it has always existed. When it is applied to people, therefore, it means much more than simply native to a region.
Sources:
Browne, Thomas. Pseudodoxia epidemica. London: T.H. for E. Dod, 1646, 325. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Bruce, James. An Interesting Narrative of the Travels of James Bruce, Esq. into Abyssinia. Samuel Shaw, ed. London: 1790, 107. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la Terre (1961). Paris: La Découvete, 2002, 41.
———. The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Richard Philcox, trans. New York: Grove Press, 2004, 149. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Gann, Lewis H. and Peter Duignan. White Settlers in Tropical Africa. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962, 9. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. “‘A Structure, Not an Event.’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity.” Lateral, 5.1, Spring 2016.
Musgrave, Samuel. Two Dissertations. London: J. Nichols, 1782, 17. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. indigenous, adj.; third edition, June 2011, s.v. autochthonous, adj.
Stanhope, Michael. Cures Without Care. London: William Jones, 1632, 26. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
University of British Columbia, First Nations Studies Program. “Global Actions.”
Photo credit: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, public domain image.