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This chapter approaches the historical questions with ethnographic comparison between the experiences of marginalization, oppression, and claims of special rights by one indigenous society in Canada and another in West Africa. These two cases help show some of the various ways distinct societies or peoples claiming indigenous identity are marginalized and diminished by states, dominant ethnic groups, and multinational corporations. Although this chapter does not present the complete tool kit of oppression employed against distinct societies, the strategies encountered—and those that seem to stimulate most clearly grievance and identity politics—range from ethnocidal policies to the perpetration of ethnic cleansing. The Canada/Africa comparison also reveals something of the history of the indigenous peoples' movement itself, for it was through an extension of participation in international consultations and standard-setting exercises to self-identifying indigenous peoples from Africa and Asia in the 1990s that the indigenous peoples' movement became more fully global.

This chapter examines the case of a group of Bushmen/San/Basarwa and Bakgalagadi/Bantu that for the first time in Botswana brought the national Government as respondent in front of the High Court of their State, claiming an indigenous identity and their right to go back to their ‘ancestral’ land, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), after being relocated by the same Government. It explores the relationship between anthropology, law, and indigeneity, considering the central role that anthropology had in the case, as ‘expert witness’ and ‘factual witness’. The case itself is also considered as the subject of anthropological reflection and ethnographic enquiry. In the Court Case, different identities had to be negotiated. The chapter focuses on two: those of the Anthropologist; and the Bushmen, who have to mediate their identity amidst the expectations of the law, judges, NGOs, and their community. It shows how indigeneity was practiced inside the courtroom, and how the Bushmen and the Anthropologist were both compelled to assume identities and use language recognizable to national and international legal discourse. This Court Case raises questions about Bushman's identity, anthropological practice, and the context in which indigenous identities are articulated.

This chapter investigates whether bilingual and transitional literacy programmes can effectively be developed in multilingual and culturally diverse social contexts, such as the Philippines and other Asian nations. It argues that educational policies play a critical role in recognising the place of languages in Indigenous identity. The chapter describes current innovations in first language education in the elementary years in the Philippines. It draws on examples from Manobo and Kalagan language communities in Mindanao and the Kalinga languages of northern Luzon.

English Catholics and Discourses of the Nation begins by situating the book within current work on early modern Catholic culture and in relation to ongoing debates about national identity-formation in the pre-industrial era. The chapter then takes up the vexed concept of a Catholic community and the relation between stay-at-home Catholics and their exiled brethren. Stay-at-home Catholics adhered tenaciously to an indigenous version of their faith that they saw as being threatened as much by imported forms of Catholicism as by Protestant innovations. The second part of the chapter turns looks at the reign of Mary and Philip as a time when some of the key concepts of English Catholic nationalism were formulated.

The people who would become the Xocó Indians and the quilombolas of Mocambo share a common backland history, culture, and politics—all of which came to be mobilized and revised by them in the years since the first discussions of possible indigenous identity in the early 1970s. This chapter describes that common heritage and identifies the contradictory character of the place and culture of the rural hinterland that is known as the sertão. It shows how these historical contradictions informed and enabled the differentiation and legalization of Indian and black identities in a place where ethnoracial mixture has been, and continues to be, the operative assumption.

This chapter considers the contemporary implications for Indigenous peoples attempting to both recover and rebuild their nations while simultaneously asserting a political voice that often transcends precolonial national borders. Focused mainly on the Australian case, it also draws comparisons with Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States in considering the challenges of trying to develop a pan-Indigenous political identity in a colonial/postcolonial nation that has never recognized the borders of Indigenous nations. Implicit in this analysis is an understanding of the deep and wide-ranging diversity of Indigenous life and culture, both within Australia and elsewhere in the world. Despite this diversity, however, the category of indigeneity still functions to denote a political solidarity among colonized peoples, including with regard to their precolonial borders, such as is evident at the United Nations through the development on the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Theorizations of gender and race in Latin America have led to wide-ranging views concerning women and men in subaltern groups, whether indigenous or Afro-descendant, rural or urban. Views are similarly wide ranging when theorizing turns to the implications of tourism development for subaltern peoples in the region. Just as it is customary to emphasize the historically subordinate status of women and racial minorities in Latin America, so too it is customary to show that tourism in the neoliberal era has particularly harsh consequences for these marginalized social sectors. At a time of indigenous mobilization, increasing migration, and urbanization, we must recognize the complex and often surprising ways in which gender, race, and tourism intertwine. Ethnographic cases from Andean Peru and Chiapas, Mexico, suggest that indigenous women play more or less prominent roles in tourism depending on several factors, with women who are active in the wider society holding more substantial positions in community-based cultural tourism.

This chapter explores how Aboriginal radio producers at FM stations in urban Australia negotiate tensions between their understandings of the voice as a technologically malleable site of expressive practice and as the foundation of indigenous identity and political agency. Aboriginal Australians have been producing radio and building radio stations for just over thirty years. Today many Aboriginal radio stations foster collective reflection on the voice as both social and technical facts, amenable to extensive expressive manipulation, governmental development, and intra-Aboriginal reflection. This chapter examines how the politics and significance of vocal sound emerged from the streets of Brisbane as much as from the studio. It considers how the techniques of radio and its globally mobile musical content make the sounds of Aboriginal voices provocative and problematic. It frames radio as a site of cultural production to show how indigenous radio stations figure as institutions that enable insight into the emergence of a local “voice consciousness.” Finally, it discusses the ethnography of voice mediation.

This chapter examines how Disney’s Aulani Resort, located on O‘ahu’s ‘Ewa coast, has been able to create stories that indigenize and facilitate its corporate colonial presence in Hawai‘i. It considers how Disney’s indigenization narratives coincide with themes of simulated native presence and implied native absence, suggesting that Mickey Mouse is yet another ‘iole who consumes, displaces, and dispossesses. It shows that Disney has built its multibillion-dollar business empire by appropriating and distorting the stories of a particular place and/or creating new stories so as to naturalize an agenda of corporate capitalism. It also discusses the ways in which Disneyfication parallels and often incorporates settler colonial constructions of Indigenous peoples as noble savages. Finally, it explains Disney’s tenuous belonging and its implications for Kānaka Maoli Indigenous identity.

This chapter discusses native authors of fiction. Indigenous, colonized, or native authors of fiction in English are rare in the British Empire before 1950. There are exceptions, however, in India, there is a body of English-language fiction from the second half of the nineteenth-century onwards. Nevertheless, a sustained presence and the development of a local literary tradition in English were difficult. The short story, published in newspapers and magazines, was a more common though at the same time more ephemeral form than the novel. Native writers authored prose collections of Indigenous myths and legends in English, overtly signalling their authority to do so in terms of their Indigenous identity and the access it entailed.

This chapter summarizes the origins of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico, from the 1875 journey of the first missionaries to Mexico to the 1887 establishment of polygamous Mormon Colonies in the northern Mexican wilderness. The chapter argues that early converts to Mormonism in Mexico were attracted first to etiological narratives from Mormon scripture expounding on the chosen-ness of indigenous Americans and second to Mormon communalism. Early converts included Plotino Rhodakanaty, the father of Mexican anarchism, who sought to build a colony in collaboration with the Mormon Church. His aversion to hierarchical control soon separated him from Mormonism. Agrarian peasants from villages on Mexico’s Central Plateau found Mormon narratives regarding Mexico’s prophetic past and future compelling. In 1887, the Mormon Church turned its attention from proselytizing in order to build colonies in Mexico as safe havens for polygamists fleeing federal prosecution in the United States.