Truly Indigenous (Updated)

Indegeneity is relative, not absolute. It is best understood on a spectrum. I understand indegeneity as a function of several factors, including being a distinct, historic, cultural group identified by an exclusive membership that inhabits a defined, and usually isolated, territory, and has historically lacked the capacity for self-determination or has effectively been denied self-determination by technologically advanced, foreign forces.

With that in mind, read this article about a truly indigenous person, Boa Sr. Excerpt below:

The last member of a 65,000-year-old tribe has died, taking one of the world’s earliest languages to the grave. Boa Sr, who died last week aged about 85, was the last native of the Andaman Islands who was fluent in Bo. Named after the tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to the pre-Neolithic period when the earliest humans walked out of Africa.

Boa was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese, a group of tribes that are the the first descendants of early humans who migrated from Africa about 70,000 years ago and who arrived on the islands around 65,000. Other groups went on to colonise Indonesia and Australia

I’d put the Hadza tribe of Tanzania right next to the Great Andamanese on the far end of the indigeneity spectrum. Here’s an excerpt from the National Geographic article about the Hazda people:

They grow no food, raise no livestock, and live without rules or calendars. They are living a hunter-gatherer existence that is little changed from 10,000 years ago. What do they know that we’ve forgotten?

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About a thousand Hadza live in their traditional homeland, a broad plain encompassing shallow, salty Lake Eyasi and sheltered by the ramparts of the Great Rift Valley. Some have moved close to villages and taken jobs as farmhands or tour guides. But approximately one-quarter of all Hadza, including those in Onwas’s camp, remain true hunter-gatherers. They have no crops, no livestock, no permanent shelters. They live just south of the same section of the valley in which some of the oldest fossil evidence of early humans has been found. Gene tic testing indicates that they may represent one of the primary roots of the human family tree—perhaps more than 100,000 years old.

What the Hadza appear to offer—and why they are of great interest to anthropologists—is a glimpse of what life may have been like before the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Anthro pologists are wary of viewing contemporary hunter-gatherers as “living fossils,” says Frank Marlowe, a Florida State University professor of anthropology who has spent the past 15 years studying the Hadza. Time has not stood still for them. But they have maintained their foraging lifestyle in spite of long exposure to surrounding agriculturalist groups, and, says Marlowe, it’s possible that their lives have changed very little over the ages.

For more than 99 percent of the time since the genus Homo arose two million years ago, everyone lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, once plants and animals were domesticated, the discovery sparked a complete reorganization of the globe. Food production marched in lockstep with greater population densities, which allowed farm-based societies to displace or destroy hunter-gatherer groups. Villages were formed, then cities, then nations. And in a relatively brief period, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was all but extinguished. Today only a handful of scattered peoples—some in the Amazon, a couple in the Arctic, a few in Papua New Guinea, and a tiny number of African groups—maintain a primarily hunter-gatherer existence. Agriculture’s sudden rise, however, came with a price. It introduced infectious-disease epidemics, social stratification, intermittent famines, and large-scale war. Jared Diamond, the UCLA professor and writer, has called the adoption of agriculture nothing less than “the worst mistake in human history”—a mistake, he suggests, from which we have never recovered.

UPDATED:

To further illustrate the spectrum of indegeneity consider that approximately 230,000 years ago Neanderthals were the dominant hominid specie in the continent of Europe.  Approximately 40,000 years ago Homo Sapiens began settling in Europe, and within 10,000 years completely displaced Neanderthals. See Neanderthals in Our Midst, noting that:

“[M]any experts have maintained that humans completely replaced the Neanderthals, consistently out-doing them and slaughtering them when they got in the way. Other anthropologists, however, believe that rather than dying out, the Neanderthals assimilated into early human populations through interbreeding, also known as admixture.”).

Carbon-dated, anthropological evidence makes clear that Neanderthals are the indigenous hominid of Europe, at least with respect to Homo Sapiens.  If an individual today could demonstrate that he/she possesses Neanderthal blood, which may actually be possible through mitochondrial DNA studies, he/she would theoretically possess inherent indigenous rights [under, say, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] against Homo-Sapiens.

Culture, Socio-Political