What are we celebrating?

On this day we express solidarity with indigenous peoples living in about 90 countries around the world. With an estimated 7,000 languages and 5,000 distinct cultures among them, these peoples typically identify themselves as descendants of the original inhabitants of each country. They are usually also culturally distinct from the majority of people there whose ancestors arrived relatively recently. But many indigenous peoples have experienced a history of unfair exclusion, neglect and abuse, largely as a legacy of how explorers, settlers and colonisers, mainly of European origin, entered and took their lands in recent centuries. Yet many have survived and continue to nurture their distinct traditions and ways of understanding the world.

Why are we celebrating?

Each indigenous people holds a store of traditional social and ecological knowledge, ranging from techniques of survival to insights that could help resolve the deepest dilemmas of modern life. Among their thousands of distinct cultures are many unique perspectives on nature and humanity’s place in it. The more indigenous thinking engages with the mainstream, the greater the spectrum of solutions available to help resolve local, national and global problems. Indigenous peoples’ day 2023 is focused on the current generation of indigenous youth as a particularly energetic source of such solutions.

Deep background 1: people create cultures.

How humanity came to be divided into ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ people is a complex story. It starts with the fact that, as a species, our main claim to fame is that we can’t help being creative. We’re always making bits of culture, including languages, arts, tools, stories, beliefs, and new ways of describing, thinking, or doing things. We create small ones by ourselves, and larger ones with others, often by joining up what we and others are doing. All these fragments interact, making each other more or less likely to persist, produce others, or be forgotten. They include all the rules that keep bundles of culture going long enough for us to grow up with them and consider them normal. This is where our feeling of belonging to a distinct people comes from. For humanity as a whole, the result is a turbulent cultural ocean, with islands of stability representing peoples, each thinking of themselves as the people.

Deep background 2: people used to be very settled.

Before the European onslaught starting about 600 years ago, most of the world was occupied by thousands of different peoples. Each one had adapted to its own ecological circumstances, had its own culture, and had some kind of settled arrangement with its neighbours. Not always peaceful, but always organic and with each people knowing themselves to be unique and rooted in their own place, while accepting that other peoples saw themselves in the same ways. There were no orders from above because there was no above. Each people was the centre of its own world, living in the land by its own laws. Sometimes they shared with their neighbours a way to explain all this, like the Dreamtime of Aboriginal Australia, but sometimes they did not.

Deep background 3: people can make trouble.

Even settled people sometimes have to move, or some of them decide they want to, for various reasons ranging from environmental events to prophetic dreams. If the time is right then leaders emerge and people will follow. Having moved, they arrive elsewhere with little reliable knowledge of how to live there, and resident people (if any) may resist the invasion. Either way, the newcomers disrupt local systems: easy wild prey animals are massacred, new species of crops and livestock are introduced, and native vegetation is cleared. But after a generation or two, what were the new arrivals settle down and start thinking of themselves as indigenous again, with their own local laws, traditions and ways of life. This was the pattern as we became human over hundreds of millenia, and it was the same pattern while we occupied most of the world over the tens of millennia since then.

The European onslaught.

By the 15th century, what had once been the indigenous peoples of Europe had already been hammered by invasions, plagues, empires, genocides, and the intrusion of new ideas over several millennia. Throughly mixed up, and newly-energised by the reconquest of Iberia from Islam, they created ideas and technologies that allowed them to see the whole world as a discoverable and exploitable frontier. The Age of Discovery began, gently at first with Portuguese trade, but then more aggressively with Spanish advances in the New World. This set a pattern that impelled other European peoples to go everywhere to steal anything that they liked the look of from the locals. It became rational to distinguish between ‘European’ people, including all those raised in their ways, and ‘indigenous’ people who were so often their prey or coerced labourers, or (later) the second-class citizens of their empires and states.

Genocide, ethnocide, ecocide.

There are few ethical ways to obtain land for free that is already claimed. European colonists in many parts of the Americas had it relatively easy since so many indigenous people quickly died of introduced diseases. But elsewhere, such people could be (and were) declared inhuman, shot, poisoned, enslaved, or else broken militarily and the survivors moved out of the way. Thus lands were freed for new settlements, plantations and mines, creating social calamities across the world. Since the newcomers often had absolutely no idea of how to live sustainably where they now were, ecological calamities were also inevitable. Both kinds of disaster proliferated as the new ways forced themselves into every aspect of life. All this added up to the wholesale destruction of peoples (‘genocide’), ways of life (‘ethnocide’), and ecosystems (‘ecocide’).

New values, new purposes.

Indigenous peoples who managed to survive the European onslaught are now worth more than their weight in gold. Without them and their different ways of thinking, we would have only a limited global culture to guide us, one that is so full of bad habits that it can’t imagine or organise its way out of wrecking the world. As it is, though, we can still respectfully draw on immensely diverse cultural resources owned by indigenous peoples. And the sooner we learn from them how to think like indigenous people again, the better. With their help, we might be able to restore peace with nature – peace with the Great Mother, or Pachamama as many South American indigenous peoples call her. The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples reminds us of that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and time is ticking by.

© Julian Caldecott 2023