Talk:Indigenous peoples
Extremely few, e.g. Stone Age Amazonians, have not contacted European societies, and retain independence, enforcing it by hunting down and killing interlopers.
- Is this either NPOV or accurate?
This whole article looks dodgy to me – lumping all 'indigenous peoples' together, and ascribing common behaviour to them.
From the article:
- Historically, indigenous peoples have resisted all attempts by outsiders to define their identity or influence their traditional governance structures.
What social group is this not true of?
There is a problem with the definition in that in many cases, the people who are considered indigenous arrived at the same time or later than "non-indigenous" peoples. This is the case with a large number of Native American tribes.
Note: this article appears to be by the same author as the lengthy stuff about "ecoregional democracy" and "ecoregional constituencies", neither of which can be found on Google — it appears to reflect their world-view.
The new version is looking better... working towards NPOV The Anome
The new version tends to the UN point of view. Which is mostly a bunch of dignity talk. It fails to make the close link between ecology and lifeways and languages which is what characterizes an 'indigenous' people with origins in prehistory.
- All societies have origins in prehistory.
"Extremely few, e.g. Stone Age Amazonians, have not contacted European societies, and retain independence, enforcing it by hunting down and killing interlopers."
- Can you break this sentence down grammatically? Are you saying that most (indigenous societies) do retain independence, and when they do it they do it by hunting down and killing interlopers, or are you saying that they don't usually retain independence? It's at the very least improperly puctuated and at the worst fractured, but I don't know how to fix it.
This is a fact. Rubber tappers going into tribal territory in the Western Amazon are killed by blowguns. The tribes know that they will get diseases they have no immunity to, as they've seen other tribes devastated this way by do-gooders and stray Europeans. There are I believe three such tribes left.
"ecoregional democracy" is sometimes called "bioregional districts" or "bioregional representation" or 200 other names – all slightly differently defined. Ecoregional democracy is a blanket term reflecting the new word "ecoregion" now defined strictly in ecology. It may not be the term that evolves for this, but that's an issue to discuss in that 'talk' section not here.
I find this phrase confusing:
- Advocates of the concept of indigenous peoples
I think the writer means:
- Advocates for the practice of leaving the cultures of indigenous peoples intact, and not assimilating them into (so-called) civilization
The first phrase, if used at all, should be used in the sense of defining what an indigenous people is. The definition of what constitutes an indigenous people should be made distinct from the various positions that advocates take on how the powers in the outside world ought to deal with indigenous peoples:
- assimilators, such as some missionaries (?) want to assimilate them (not me, by the way)
- preservers want to preserve them: some because the idealize the state of man in nature (perhaps in a Rousseau-ish sense); others on other grounds.
Let's distinguish the various points of view, shall we?
You say:
- There are I believe three such tribes left.
Really? What are their names? Please provide cites. Otherwise all you are providing is your opinions.
Spaniards
- In other words the Spaniards greatly outpowered the Indians.
You can't argue this for the conquest of Mexico and Peru. The conquistadors were a small troup facing whole empires. They had horses, iron, guns and dogs, but that can't unbalance an empire. The conquistadors' victory was also because of illnesses, internal trouble and their alliance with indigenous rebels.
Besides the rest of the paragraph seems a confusing discussion of counterviews.
Cleanup
I've just added a cleanup tag to this page. The text as it stands is incoherent, frequently ungrammatical, and is too close to being a collection of POV statements rather than a real resource. --128.135.155.190 22:39, 13 May 2005 (UTC)