Transcending Aboriginality and Minority: Indigeneity in Asia As a Construct of Structural Oppression Under the Economic Globalization Regime

While providing for some general indications as to who qualifies for indigenous rights protection, existing identification criteria in determining indigeneity grapple with theoretical challenges and have not surfaced a characteristic of indigenous peoples not shared by other minoritized or vulnerable groups. Approaches developed by legal and anthropological scholarship to determining indigenousness require pre-colonial territorial precedence. This harkens back to the phenomena of European colonization and invasion, restricts the recognition of indigenous rights to peoples in the Americas and Australasia, and excludes similar groups in Africa and Asia whose oppression was by natives of neighboring territories who assumed a position of political dominance in the aftermath of nation-building. It also makes everyone in Asia indigenous because all of them can claim precolonial territorial precedence. If everyone is indigenous, then no one is discriminated and vulnerable; ergo, there are no indigenous issues.Because of the lack of conceptual cleanliness, many Asian states deny the existence of indigenous peoples among them, claiming that all their peoples inhabited their territories at the same time. Such negates the protection international law mandates for indigenous peoples.This paper argues that to determine indigeneity at present, it is imperative to look at the normative undercurrents of indigenous claims and of the international recognition of indigenous rights. Groups in Asia, in which 75% of the world’s indigenous peoples are concentrated, assert indigenousness to resist development aggression into their domains which are the richest reservoirs of Earth’s vestigial biodiversity and resources. On the other hand, international legal protection for indigenous peoples is intended to shield them from the adverse consequences of economic globalization projects. Beyond aboriginality, therefore, indigeneity is a combination of distinctive characteristics of a people claiming it and the consequences of oppressive policies imposed on it by dominant forces in society.