Indigenous People

DEFINITION

The indigenous has the common meaning of "from" or "of the original origin".

Indigenous peoples can be used to describe any ethnic group of people who inhabit a geographic region with which they have the earliest known historical connection, alongside more recent immigrants who have populated the region and may be greater in number.

However, the specific term indigenous peoples has a more restrictive interpretation when it used in the more formalized, legalistic, and academic sense, associated with the collective rights of human populations.

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURE

Indigenous societies possess an often unique body of cultural and environmental knowledge. The preservation and investigation of specialized Indigenous knowledge, particularly in relation to the resources of the natural environment with which the society is associated, is an increasingly sought-after goal of both the Indigenous and the societies who thereby seek to identify new resources and benefits (example: partnerships established to research useful biological extracts from vegetation in the Amazon rainorest.

HISTORICAL INDIGENOUS

CULTURES

The migration, expansion and settlement of societies throughout different territories is a universal, almost defining thread which runs through the entire course of human history. Many of the cross-cultural interactions which arose as a result of these historical encounters involved societies which might properly be considered as indigenous, either from their own viewpoint or that of external societies.

Most often, these past encounters between Indigenous and "non-indigenous" groups lack contemporary account or description. Any assessment or understanding of impact, result and relation can at best only be surmised, using archaeological, linguistic or other reconstructive means. Where accounts do exist, they frequently originate from the viewpoint of the colonizing, expansionary or nascent state.