Keywords for Today by The Keywords Project The Keywords; MacCabe Colin; Yanacek Holly

Author:The Keywords Project, The Keywords; MacCabe, Colin; Yanacek, Holly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

INDIGENOUS

The origin and derivation of the adjective indigenous show little ambiguity or range, but the usage of the word as a less objectionable alternative to native charts an important political-semantic terrain today. In fact, indigene was used, both as adjective and noun, in English in C17 and C18, as a synonym of native, though it is now obsolete. Coming from the Latin indigenus, which meant anyone “born in a country, native,” indigenous, in its mainstream use, has gradually narrowed to signify only current representatives of select pre-colonial groups with distinct lifestyles.

This reduction in scope of the original use of the term, as well as its technical application, which has taken on a specialized character after lC20, fulfills the need for a politically correct label for the “aboriginal” inhabitants of a specific (often third-world) area, once “native” became unacceptable. There is, thus, continuity in change here. In the early recorded uses from mC17 onward, indigenous referred more generally to “born or produced naturally in a land or region: native or belonging naturally to (the soil, region, etc.),” but even at that time it was “used primarily of aboriginal inhabitants or natural products.” The earliest recorded use in 1646 is instructive because it so clearly defines indigenous as the proper (most legitimate) native: “Although . . . there bee . . . swarmes of Negroes serving under the Spaniard, yet were they all transported from Africa . . . and are not indigenous or proper natives of America.”

There is, however, a productive tension between the crucial gains achieved by the international indigenous peoples’ movement over the past fifty years and this general usage. This UN-facilitated movement is aspirational as well as political, describing indigenous peoples in terms of their distinct lifestyles and marginalization—both externally through European colonialism and internally by more localized conquests—who seek the preservation and transmission of their identities, cultures, and territories. Thus, individuals self-identify as indigenous but require group acceptance through a shared consciousness.

The link between the more specialized and selective current meaning with the more general past use of indigenous is its meticulous relationship as the (european) Other, though “indigenous peoples” is also a political construct that, in theory at least, can also refer to a small number of distinct marginalized groups living in the European continent, and it is deliberately less pejorative than its now discredited near-synonym, native. A parallel, though much less frequent meaning relates to “innateness,” and this is without any pejorative comparison at all, as in “Joy and hope are emotions indigenous to the human mind” (a1864; compare similar use of native in, for instance, “native intelligence”).

Hence, indigenization, an addition to English in mC20, seeks to describe a process in which there is “an increased use of indigenous people in government, employment etc.” as an end result of “adaptation or subjection to the influence or dominance of the indigenous inhabitants of a country.” A good example of the complicated processes at work is in the 1954 example, “Making the Church really indigenous with greater indigenization of leadership as well as support.

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