Tribal Peoples for Tomorrow’s World

Critics of tribal peoples’ rights often assert that those who support them want the people to remain poor. But that is not what is at stake at all: it is rather a case of trying to prevent people being driven away from self-sufficiency and towards impoverishment by others taking their land and resources.

Indigenous peoples are the descendants of those who were there before others who now constitute the mainstream and dominant society. They are defined partly by descent, partly by the particular features that indicate their distinctiveness from those who arrived later, and partly by their own view of themselves.

Real culture is not a dead mask. It is alive,

Ideas, things and even individuals can cross in both directions, but however porous and elastic the boundary is – and both are major components in its strength – it must retain its integrity if the group is to survive as a definable people.

presumed betterment that comes with ‘civilization’.

enforced schooling is the most powerful weapon used by governments and missionaries to instil in tribal children values which are different, often contradictory, to those held by their own societies.

irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.

When Margaret Thatcher famously declared that there was no such thing as society, she meant that the population should be looked at only as individuals, that there was no underlying social fabric which bound them into something which extended beyond themselves.

‘a people’ meaning an identifiable society.