Indigenous identities

Abstract

Indigenous representatives claim that indigenous cultures are ‘oral cultures’ and that oral traditions are central to their identities and forms of cultural organisation and transmission. Indigenous people have made extensive use of the research and writings of ethnographers and anthropologists to reconstruct and reinvent their traditions in the present. Indigenous identities and claims are inextricably bound up with the long period of colonisation from the late fifteenth century ‘discovery’ of the Americas, through to the 1950s that saw the beginning of the period when decolonisation movements swept across the world. Anthropologists have played key historical and contemporary roles in the development of indigenous studies. Indigenous identity-politics thus frequently involves efforts to renegotiate understandings of identity, to resist colonialist imposition of identities, and to free indigenous peoples to recapture their authentic indigenous self-identities and world-views. According to R. Niezen, self-determination is at once the greatest challenge from indigenous peoples, and a key unifying claim for the global indigenous movement.