The Global Meanings of Indigeneity, and What to Learn from them For Our Ecological Crisis: Reflections on Indigenous Peoples Day 2025

The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.

“Indigenous peoples around the world share a special relationship to their natural environment, one profoundly different from the notions of human superiority that have led us into our current ecological crisis.”

On the Deep Meaning of Indigeneity

About half a billion people around the world identify as Indigenous. According to a widespread understanding of indigeneity, being Indigenous is about having roots to a place that precede those of later invaders. But if that were all there is to this notion, it would not create very much commonality among Indigenous peoples—who, by the way, sometimes also refer to their totality as the Fourth World, by way of contrast with the ensemble of the First, Second, and Third World. That is, Indigenous peoples thereby see themselves in contrast to the overall system of states that has grown out of European colonialism. And that there is more to their commonalities than having been at certain places longer than others also is clear from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Passed in 2007, UNDRIP identifies a broad range of concerns that are commonly shared across Indigenous people around the world. 

One of these is a sense of interconnectedness with the rest of nature—a kinship understanding of what it means to be human in the world. On the occasion of Indigenous Peoples Day 2025, it is worth pausing to reflect on this fact, and to see what we might learn from it at a time when climate change is profoundly changing human possibilities on this planet. Unfortunately, and tragically, this is also a time when the United States of America declines to take its responsibilities to preserve the planet for future generations seriously.

Two Senses of Indigeneity

Etymologically, “Indigenous” people are those born into a given territory. Singling out a group in such a way might make sense in two related but distinct ways, each stressing something deemed important. We often discuss the same people in given locations using both senses of indigeneity but express different ideas about them depending on which sense we have in mind. The first, comparative sense recognizes that in a particular region certain people who live there have a connection to the region that predates that of everyone else present.

Alternatively, the non-comparative sense might be that certain people are born into a region: they are from there. No contrast with others is raised when this sense is used (and nobody else might live there)—the point is to emphasize a connection between a group and the land and other resources. To be sure, when we discuss “Indigenous” people non-comparatively we normally wish to say more than just that they are native to the area. We typically mean that this group has shaped the location and has been shaped by it.

This second sense recalls that, as humanity spread around the planet, over tens of thousands of years, our ancestors needed to engage productively with the possibilities of their natural environment. Doing so enabled them to adapt locally to ways of life that were sustainable over generations. Since their departure from Africa, our homo sapiens ancestors have found ways of making a living in multifarious locations around the world. Humans managed to build lives in deep forests, in coastal and riverine areas dominated by water, in the Arctic tundra shaped by snow, in mountainous regions, on open plains, and so forth.

“Humanity could make a living on this planet only by being guided by a kinship understanding of life with the rest of nature.”

Their intelligence enabled our ancestors to grasp how to survive and even flourish in most environments. They designed tools, developed shelter, built symbiotic relationships with animals, figured out weather patterns and seasonal trends, and understood how various parts of ecosystems hung together and could be shaped to their advantage. So to say of a people that they are indigenous in this second sense means they are part of something like this.

Small-Scale World-Making in the History of Humanity

Wherever human presence lasted for generations, with ambitions to endure longer, these humans had to be prudent (and wise) enough to understand how to shape the world around them in sustainable ways. We can think of this as small-scale world-making: humans shaped the part of the world they inhabited to survive, and their customs were shaped conversely by their environment.

Small-scale world-making generated bodies of knowledge about what is required for humans to flourish. To do so sustainably, there needed to be some understanding of how the rest of nature can flourish with humans in the mix. To be sure, such knowledge might serve people for a while, and then no more. Circumstances might change due to population growth or land overuse, or social and political structures might interfere negatively with successful deployment of hard-won knowledge, as geographer Jared Diamond famously argued in his reflections on societal collapse in his book Collapse.

Both the comparative and the non-comparative sense of indigeneity reveal something important about how humanity has inhabited this planet. The non-comparative sense points to the ways humanity spread around the world. The comparative sense draws attention to developments that, in recent centuries, have marginalized many of the peoples who are still most closely tied to small-scale world-making within the emerging global political and economic system. In contemporary discourse, the comparative sense is often predominant.

It is a consequence of European expansionism that much nomenclature of people and locations around the world captures perspectives emerging from European “discovery.” “Discovering” a location, after all, is different from “arriving” there or “finding” this place.  Discovery implies the primacy of the geographical origin of the discoverer. Native Americans are “Indians” or “Indios” because Columbus got his coordinates wrong. (As the joke has it, it was a good thing for Indigenous people in the Americas that Columbus was not looking for Turkey.) And he arrived from a place that mattered politically. So he did not just “find them” or “get there”—he “discovered” them and therefore was entitled to name people who had inhabited the places where he landed for a very long time.

If we call them “Native Americans” or “Amerindians,” we still contrast them with others who arrived millennia later than their own ancestors did, doing so centuries after the events that made it meaningful to speak this way. Moreover, we refer to them in a way that honors Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the Americas were named.

Native Americans often refer to North America as “Turtle Island.” This nomenclature originates in the Northeast but is used by Native Americans elsewhere as a way of avoiding colonial nomenclature. Vespucci’s claim to fame is that he realized that various locations other voyagers had reached in the Western Hemisphere belonged to the same landmass, a landmass different from Asia. The Americas were thus named to recognize someone who answered questions arising from within the European view of the world. Connotations of secondary status attach to being “discovered.” The comparative sense of indigeneity captures all of this.

The Contemporary Notion of Indigeneity

But while the contrast between people already in a territory and invasive (European) groups is central to it, contemporary use of “indigeneity” is wider—even before we get to the non-comparative sense. There are three ways of seeing why this would be.

First, Indigenous populations and settlers would not normally remain separate for long.  Sharp contrasts fade over generations if populations mix. For instance, Spanish and Portuguese conquests typically involved mostly male invaders taking control, who formed relationships with Indigenous women. Indigenous populations remain (as in most countries across the Americas), but in time social realities were no longer predominantly driven by contrasts between Indigenous and settler populations. Instead, mixed populations emerged, such as the Mestizos in Central and South America or Métis in Canada.

Second, it is not only Europeans who created lasting conflict by taking territory. Uyghurs and Tibetans are Indigenous people overpowered by Han Chinese. There are multiple Indigenous groups in the interior of Taiwan that have persevered through changing political circumstances. The Ryukyuans are a group of Indigenous peoples on an archipelago that stretches northeast of Taiwan toward Kyushu and whose largest island is Okinawa. The Ryukyu archipelago was annexed by Japan in 1879. To this day, Japan refuses to acknowledge Ryukyuans as either minorities or Indigenous peoples. When they invaded Okinawa in 1945, the Americans targeted Ryukyuans counting them as Japanese. Meanwhile, the Japanese sacrificed Ryukyuans counting them as subject people.

To mention another example, Iraqi Assyrians are an ethnic and linguistic minority indigenous to Upper Mesopotamia. Known from history as driving forces in the rise and fall of the great Mesopotamian empires of Akkad, Assyria, and Babylonia, in the last two millennia Assyrians have persevered as Eastern Christians. Having experienced centuries of conquest, they now live amid growing Kurdish nationalist ambitions, which in turn have a difficult relationship with the state of Iraq. Like Uyghurs, Tibetans, Indigenous groups of Taiwan, and Ryukyuans, Assyrians are an Indigenous group that does not have this status in relation to invading Europeans.

Third, contrasts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups often draw not so much on invasions but on divisions of power and control over territory that involve a domineering population and others whose way of life has secondary status. Think of the San in Namibia and other places in southern Africa, the Tuareg across the Sahara, or the Maasai in Tanzania. Many such groups inhabit a vast area in South and Southeast Asia known as Zomia, which has historically been beyond regular government control. This area includes the highlands of northern Vietnam, most of Laos, parts of Thailand, northern Myanmar, southwest China, and northeast India.

The contemporary world is largely divided among states, and state structures connect territory and resources to the global political and economic system. Groups inhabiting the territories just mentioned live in states dominated by other groups. Their status has much in common with that of Indigenous peoples elsewhere whose indigeneity is understood against the background of invasions. For this reason, they often are referred to, and see themselves, as Indigenous.

As a reflection of such complexities, a broader notion of indigeneity emerged—different from the comparative notion that implied a contrast between people already in a territory and invasive groups, but also from the non-comparative notion. This notion combines components of historical precedent and close ties to land, but also exclusion, exploitation, dispossession, and marginalization. Only in recent decades have cultures around the world found common purpose in understanding themselves as Indigenous. But in these decades there has been a flurry of activity around Indigenous concerns in a broad sense, especially within the UN system. These activities culminated in UNDRIP.

“Small-scale world-making generated diverse, locally specific bodies of knowledge about the environment—and an enduring sense of mutual obligation across species.”

In light of what we have now explored, it should be unsurprising that endeavors to define indigeneity—and thus attempts to capture this broader sense, especially for legally binding claims—have been contentious ever since indigeneity received international attention. Often, efforts at providing a definition are suspended altogether. To this day, the UN has not adopted a system-wide definition.

The UN’s “Working Definition” of Indigeneity

Still, a “working definition” is widely used, which stems from the work of Ecuadorian diplomat Jose R. Martinez Cobo, Special Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. His definition reflects complex processes through which far-flung groups around the world increasingly saw themselves as sharing common concerns in relation to a dominant postcolonial culture. But while these common concerns are distinctly related to both the comparative and non-comparative notions, contemporary usage is not reducible to them. Martinez Cobo’s “working definition” reads as follows:

Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal system.

This historical continuity may consist of the continuation, for an extended period reaching into the present of one or more of the following factors:

1. Occupation of ancestral lands, or at least of part of them;
2. Common ancestry with the original occupants of these lands;
3. Culture in general, or in specific manifestations (such as religion, living under a tribal system, membership of an Indigenous community, dress, means of livelihood, lifestyle, etc.);
4. Language (whether used as the only language, as mother-tongue, as the habitual means of communication at home or in the family, or as the main, preferred, habitual, general or normal language);
5. Residence on certain parts of the country, or in certain regions of the world;
6. Other relevant factors.

On an individual basis, an Indigenous person is one who belongs to these Indigenous populations through self-identification as Indigenous (group consciousness) and is recognized and accepted by these populations as one of its members (acceptance by the group). This preserves for these communities the sovereign right and power to decide who belongs to them, without external interference.

This “working definition” captures the complexity in the usage of indigeneity that has emerged over time, including the increasingly important component of self-identification.

Lessons to Learn

It is remarkable that such far-flung groups can be meaningfully classified under indigeneity in ways that amount to more than contrasts to later arrivals. And indeed, they see themselves as meaningfully classified this way. At least this is so as far as the perspectives of the leadership in many such groups are concerned, which includes people who in time became allies through activities under the aegis of the UN.

Inevitably this will be an elite phenomenon and integrate some groups better than others. In this regard, the global Indigenous movement is no different from other transnational efforts. There are movements such as Pan-Africanism, Pan-Asianism, or the Négritude movement, movements based on regional, racial, or cultural similarities formed in response to European expansionism. However, none of them has the global scope or character of indigeneity.

Indigenous peoples around the world share a special relationship to their natural environment. In the many millennia it took humanity to claim the planet, basic ways of living in natural habitats emerged. These processes unfolded differently across diverse landscapes. But what was required for survival was serious engagement with local flora and fauna, as well as weather patterns, topography, and resources. Where humans stayed for a long time, deep connections to locations evolved. Such small-scale world-making generated diverse, locally specific bodies of knowledge about the environment. Around the world it also generated similar ideas about the relationship between humans and the rest of nature, including an authentic connection to land and a pervasive sense of relatedness and mutual obligations across species (“kinship”).

All of this is very different from notions of human superiority over the rest of nature, human separateness, or human domination. And these are the notions that have formed the conceptual core of the cultural processes that have led us into the current ecological crisis.

Now that we are amid this ecological crisis, we ought to remember that humanity could make a living on this planet only by being guided by such a kinship understanding of life with the rest of nature. Across continents, Indigenous people often carry on this tradition. The rest of us should learn from them in this regard—and especially we in the United States of America ought to learn this lesson, instead of stepping away from our intergenerational responsibility to keep the planet inhabitable for future generations.