Indigenous Peoples

Historical Placement of Indigenous Peoples in the Human Timeline

This indigenous political group called the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) protested the 2002 summit of the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Quito, Ecuador, on October 31, 2002.

Source: Wikipedia/Donovan & Scott

The Industrial Revolution took place approximately seven generations ago. In contrast, the tenure on Earth of nonindustrialized peoples represented by today's indigenous cultures is an estimated 36,000 generations. Indigenous hunting-and-gathering peoples represent 99 percent of historic human cultures; in 2009, indigenous peoples still represent 90 percent of global cultural diversity. Indigenous cultures are intimately tied to their geographic homelands. Whatever the archeological evidence for the length of continuous residence for some on their lands—up to 100,000 years—indigenous peoples characteristically see themselves, their ways of life, and their lands as created in concert with one another.

[Page 222]Many of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia, and Africa were hunters and gatherers. Others were farmers, like the dryland farmers of the American Southwest, who still live in villages thousands of years old, or the rice farmers of Asia. Others were fisherman, like the Coast Salish of Puget Sound, who lived in multifamily cedar longhouses that might cover an acre of ground. Still others practiced shifting horticulture, like the Kayapó of Brazil, who took more than one generation to move over their traditional territory, seeding wild gardens as they went. And some lived as island fisherman and yam gardeners in the Pacific or nomadic herders in the Middle East and Africa. Altogether, subsistence strategies of indigenous peoples entail some combination of hunting, gathering, fishing, herding, agriculture, and shifting horticulture in a context of ongoing flexibility and adaptation.

Today, many indigenous peoples are bicultural, as they both adhere to their ancient values and ways of life and respond to the pressures of the modern world.

Colonialism, Development, and Indigenous Subsistence Strategies

The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples defines indigenous peoples as cultural communities having prior residence on lands within modern nation-states. It affirms the rights of these peoples both to cultural self-determination and to control their traditional lands and natural resources. It also points out the current marginalization of these peoples, resulting from a colonial legacy of disease, poverty, violence, starvation, slavery, and forced sterilization. Though indigenous peoples traditionally stabilized their populations by various child-spacing methods, many have a higher birth rate today, as they attempt to replace populations stressed to the brink of extinction. To set the repopulation of indigenous communities in the context of environmental impact, on a daily basis, a person living in a modern industrialized nation uses as much as two dozen times the natural resources as does an individual living in an indigenous community.

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