Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity

Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity

Dawa Lokyitsang argues that the more important question is not whether Tibetans are Indigenous but what political stakes shape the answer. She shows that indigeneity began as a racial category created by settler governments in North America to justify taking Indigenous land and governing Indigenous people, and that Indigenous sovereignty movements have since fought over and reshaped the term, so its meaning depends on who is defining it.

Drawing on the work of Emily Yeh, she shows that Tibetan exile leaders rejected the label in the 1990s, because UN and Indian frameworks presented Indigenous peoples as backward, tribal and dependent on rights, not as sovereign nations. She points out that the People’s Republic of China voted for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 while denying that any Indigenous peoples exist in China and classifying Tibetans as a minzu, an ethnic minority. She also discusses how state categories in India push groups to perform backwardness, and the growing involvement of Tibetans in North America in Indigenous struggles such as Idle No More and the protests at Standing Rock.

She concludes that the useful questions are where, when and why Tibetans claim or reject indigeneity, and that it can be a political tool for building solidarity and challenging settler-state control over land and sovereignty.

Full article

Read the full article on Made in China Journal

Support our work