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What does is mean in "indigenous people"? where did the other Japanese people come from? I think they should definitely be considered a minority, while still c

by gyaniv 7y ago

What does is mean in "indigenous people"? where did the other Japanese people come from? I think they should definitely be considered a minority, while still continuing with the actions mentioned in the article, like recognizing their culture and trying to help them after suffering discrimination. But I always find the term "Indigenous" weird, because we all came from somewhere, so will American from Italian descent be considered "Indigenous" (just to Italy and not America)? I feel like that word is always used to describe non western culture, things and customs that are considered "less advanced", less modern, that we need to preserve, when in reality I think it's just another culture that we need to respect and except, and that by calling that group of cultures "Indigenous" there is some racism involved (by all participants)

chubot 7y ago
If you read Guns, Germs and Steel or maybe Sapiens, then the term "indigenous" should start to make sense. Wikipedia says they are known as "first peoples": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples For the most part, that is literally true -- they were the first group of humans on that land, humans having originated in Africa. These books make the point that agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Agricultural technology enables people to get on boats and take the land of non-agricultural societies. It enables greater popular density and wealth. This happened all over the world in the same progression, at roughly the same times. In America, the indigenous peoples came from Asia by way Alaska more than 10,000 years ago. Then Europeans came by boat ~500 years ago. I don't know much about the history of Japan, but it seems to have been inhabited by non-Japanese/Chinese and then the Chinese ancestors of Japanese conquered the land. If anyone knows details I'm interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dmon_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dmon_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people China was of course one of the first agricultural societies, and this enabled them to expand their territory rapidly, on the Asian continent and beyond. There were indigenous peoples living all over the Phillipines, Polynesia, Hawaii, etc. but they look "Asian" now because of the Chinese expansion. There were two different groups of people that collided.
- mbrumlow 7y ago
  Okay, now the hard question. Why should we care that anybody was a "first people"? And how long down the line will we recognize a group of people as fist people? Do they not make babies with non first people? 10k years from now are we still going to be going on about "so and so is of so so blood line making him indigenous" ? While they seem like shitty questions, they are serious, because for somebody like me who knows little about his past, its hard to wrap my mind around being so attached to a group identity that really seems like it matters very little to your ability to succeeded and live a happy life today -- unless -- you declare being indigenous is something special and thus gives you extra rights, or more say, or something? And if having the label brings nothing, they why such the fuss? Also, I am sure we can all trace our blood back to some "first people", so now what? Can I go back to my "first peoples" land and demand to be called indigenous?
  - SpaceManNabs 7y ago
    your ancestry and heritage are very much attached to your ability to succeed and live a happy life today, in most parts of the world. That is why people want these things recognized so that statistics can be collected to shape public policy. This is even more so for people that would be indigenous such as native americans, aboriginals, tainos, and ainu.
  - harichinnan 7y ago
    Speaking from experience in India, the indigenous people in India form the lowest strata of caste system. They were I'll treated and exluded from society for 1000s of years. Government now has a "schedule" of indegenous people that require government aid and affirmative action in jobs. These are people living in abject poverty.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    Part of the issue is cultural preservation, Distinct cultures, particularly indigenous ones, have unique oral and recorded histories, and translation can lose important cultural context. As an example of that, there are a total of 10 Manchu native speakers left in the world. This is a problem because many Qing-dynasty documents are in Manchu. Also, ethnic discrimination against indigenous peoples has a long history pretty much globally. Legal equality is often not enough, because the past couple centuries have been spent whittling their economic and social capital to basically nothing. Reparations or subsidy is required for even a hope of getting those people on equal footing.
HuShifang 7y ago
The Yamato ethnicity (大和民族 Yamato minzoku), primarily descended from the Yayoi people (who are relatively recent arrivals from the mainland, i.e. first millennium CE), historically occupied Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku. They're the ethnic group usually called "Japanese," and the majority. The Ainu ethnicity, primarily descended from the Jomon people (who represented an earlier wave of in-migration to the Japanese archipelago, thousands of years BCE), historically occupied Hokkaido. Hokkaido was only integrated into the main Japanese polity in the last few hundred years. But, it's all fraught and complicated, conceptually(/politically/culturally) and empirically. (For instance, Yamato people also have Jomon heritage, and these days most Ainu also have Yayoi / Yamato heritage.) So indeed, indigeneity is complicated here, just like it is, as you say, everywhere.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  There were known Ainu populations in northern Honshu as well before the Yamato fully assimilated them, though this process happened centuries ago. The Ainu were not limited to Hokkaido.
  - HuShifang 7y ago
    Yup -- I just didn't want to go into too much detail. David Howell at Harvard has written quite a bit about identity in Japan -- see esp. "Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan" (2005).
    - state 7y ago
      Any other recommendations in the category of long-term Japanese history and anthropology? I find this subject really interesting, but have struggled to find good sources.
      - HuShifang 7y ago
        Honestly, I'm much more familiar with China scholarship than Japan scholarship, and with historical scholarship than anthropological. But Bruce Batten's To the Ends of Japan might be worth a read. There are also quite a few scholarly works concerning the role of kokugaku (roughly, "national learning") -- a fairly fundamentalist, xenophobic school of philology and philosophy that sought to purge Japanese culture of foreign "impurities", and rose to prominence from the Meiji Restoration through WWII. (It also exercised considerable influence on modern Japanese archaeology in its formative period; my impression is that its nativist premises colored many early archaeologists' findings.) Stuff on social status (John Hall's "container society" and more recent materials) might be interesting too -- e.g. on the status of burakumin).
runarberg 7y ago
It is a complicated term and it usually only refers to people groups that: a) Have a long historic and cultural tie to the region they currently occupy, b) are no longer the dominant culture in that region, and most importantly, c) consider them self indigenous, In practice an indigenous people group really only has to fulfill the last criteria. Note also that they don’t have to be the first people group to occupy a region. They don’t even have to have been there before the dominant culture arrived. For example, the Inuit people are believed to have arrived in Greenland after the Norseman in the early 11th century, and they didn’t occupy parts of east Greenland until th 20th century. Today they are arguably the dominant culture in Greenland. However nobody can dispute the fact that they are indigenous people in their land.
Tiktaalik 7y ago
> But I always find the term "Indigenous" weird, because we all came from somewhere Right but of course there is a difference between coming to NA less than 200 years ago and 15,000++ years ago. When settlers arrived in North America, Indigenous Nations in North America were systematically stripped of their lands and titles and worse. In Canada at least the notion that 'everyone came from somewhere' is viewed as a settler rhetorical tactic to loosen and obfuscate Indigenous title to the land and this is not taken kindly by Indigenous persons. Consequently in Canada Indigenous people will often state that they've been in NA 'since time immemorial' or more simply 'always'. This is not scientifically likely to be true, but it's essentially a strong assertion and underlining of the fact that the land is their unceded land and that settlers are settlers to it.
- jlawson 7y ago
  If you apply the theory that any conquered land still eternally belongs to whoever it was conquered from, then almost everybody on Earth owes their land to someone else, since everyone is descended from conquerors. This includes the American natives, who warred and took land from each other frequently. Does place X "really belong" to tribe A, who sold it to white people? Or to tribe B, who were previously conquered by tribe A? Or to tribe C, who were conquered by tribe B even before that? And so on. It also shades quickly into nativist ideas that delegitimize immigrants since even after generations since they're not "really from" the place where they live. If white Americans aren't "really from" America, it's not hard to argue that e.g. black British aren't "really from" the UK and don't have a true right to exist there if the natives disagree. If we're going to have any coherent framework around this at all, it has to include some duration of time after which people are considered naturalized to a land. I'm inclined to say that someone who was born in a place and lived there their whole life has a natural, native right to live there. But it's definitely open to discussion. What isn't open is the idea of eternal ethnic land rights. Nor is the unspoken but commonly-applied rule that whites have no exclusive rights to any place but everyone else owns the place they live in. (The American example even ignores the complexities of settler/native interactions; it was by no means a one-sided conquest; they worked together, and traded, and involved each other in inter-white and inter-tribal conflicts on both sides for centuries. Whites acted very much like just another collection of tribes on the American political field for a long time; the only long-term diffrence was not moral at all, but simply the fact that they managed to succeed where the Lakota and Iroquois and others tried but failed.)

by gyaniv 7y ago

chubot 7y ago

If you read Guns, Germs and Steel or maybe Sapiens, then the term "indigenous" should start to make sense. Wikipedia says they are known as "first peoples": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples For the most part, that is literally true -- they were the first group of humans on that land, humans having originated in Africa. These books make the point that agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Agricultural technology enables people to get on boats and take the land of non-agricultural societies. It enables greater popular density and wealth. This happened all over the world in the same progression, at roughly the same times. In America, the indigenous peoples came from Asia by way Alaska more than 10,000 years ago. Then Europeans came by boat ~500 years ago. I don't know much about the history of Japan, but it seems to have been inhabited by non-Japanese/Chinese and then the Chinese ancestors of Japanese conquered the land. If anyone knows details I'm interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dmon_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dmon_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people China was of course one of the first agricultural societies, and this enabled them to expand their territory rapidly, on the Asian continent and beyond. There were indigenous peoples living all over the Phillipines, Polynesia, Hawaii, etc. but they look "Asian" now because of the Chinese expansion. There were two different groups of people that collided.

mbrumlow 7y ago
Okay, now the hard question. Why should we care that anybody was a "first people"? And how long down the line will we recognize a group of people as fist people? Do they not make babies with non first people? 10k years from now are we still going to be going on about "so and so is of so so blood line making him indigenous" ? While they seem like shitty questions, they are serious, because for somebody like me who knows little about his past, its hard to wrap my mind around being so attached to a group identity that really seems like it matters very little to your ability to succeeded and live a happy life today -- unless -- you declare being indigenous is something special and thus gives you extra rights, or more say, or something? And if having the label brings nothing, they why such the fuss? Also, I am sure we can all trace our blood back to some "first people", so now what? Can I go back to my "first peoples" land and demand to be called indigenous?
- SpaceManNabs 7y ago
  your ancestry and heritage are very much attached to your ability to succeed and live a happy life today, in most parts of the world. That is why people want these things recognized so that statistics can be collected to shape public policy. This is even more so for people that would be indigenous such as native americans, aboriginals, tainos, and ainu.
- harichinnan 7y ago
  Speaking from experience in India, the indigenous people in India form the lowest strata of caste system. They were I'll treated and exluded from society for 1000s of years. Government now has a "schedule" of indegenous people that require government aid and affirmative action in jobs. These are people living in abject poverty.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  Part of the issue is cultural preservation, Distinct cultures, particularly indigenous ones, have unique oral and recorded histories, and translation can lose important cultural context. As an example of that, there are a total of 10 Manchu native speakers left in the world. This is a problem because many Qing-dynasty documents are in Manchu. Also, ethnic discrimination against indigenous peoples has a long history pretty much globally. Legal equality is often not enough, because the past couple centuries have been spent whittling their economic and social capital to basically nothing. Reparations or subsidy is required for even a hope of getting those people on equal footing.

HuShifang 7y ago

The Yamato ethnicity (大和民族 Yamato minzoku), primarily descended from the Yayoi people (who are relatively recent arrivals from the mainland, i.e. first millennium CE), historically occupied Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku. They're the ethnic group usually called "Japanese," and the majority. The Ainu ethnicity, primarily descended from the Jomon people (who represented an earlier wave of in-migration to the Japanese archipelago, thousands of years BCE), historically occupied Hokkaido. Hokkaido was only integrated into the main Japanese polity in the last few hundred years. But, it's all fraught and complicated, conceptually(/politically/culturally) and empirically. (For instance, Yamato people also have Jomon heritage, and these days most Ainu also have Yayoi / Yamato heritage.) So indeed, indigeneity is complicated here, just like it is, as you say, everywhere.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
There were known Ainu populations in northern Honshu as well before the Yamato fully assimilated them, though this process happened centuries ago. The Ainu were not limited to Hokkaido.
- HuShifang 7y ago
  Yup -- I just didn't want to go into too much detail. David Howell at Harvard has written quite a bit about identity in Japan -- see esp. "Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan" (2005).
  - state 7y ago
    Any other recommendations in the category of long-term Japanese history and anthropology? I find this subject really interesting, but have struggled to find good sources.
    - HuShifang 7y ago
      Honestly, I'm much more familiar with China scholarship than Japan scholarship, and with historical scholarship than anthropological. But Bruce Batten's To the Ends of Japan might be worth a read. There are also quite a few scholarly works concerning the role of kokugaku (roughly, "national learning") -- a fairly fundamentalist, xenophobic school of philology and philosophy that sought to purge Japanese culture of foreign "impurities", and rose to prominence from the Meiji Restoration through WWII. (It also exercised considerable influence on modern Japanese archaeology in its formative period; my impression is that its nativist premises colored many early archaeologists' findings.) Stuff on social status (John Hall's "container society" and more recent materials) might be interesting too -- e.g. on the status of burakumin).

runarberg 7y ago

It is a complicated term and it usually only refers to people groups that: a) Have a long historic and cultural tie to the region they currently occupy, b) are no longer the dominant culture in that region, and most importantly, c) consider them self indigenous, In practice an indigenous people group really only has to fulfill the last criteria. Note also that they don’t have to be the first people group to occupy a region. They don’t even have to have been there before the dominant culture arrived. For example, the Inuit people are believed to have arrived in Greenland after the Norseman in the early 11th century, and they didn’t occupy parts of east Greenland until th 20th century. Today they are arguably the dominant culture in Greenland. However nobody can dispute the fact that they are indigenous people in their land.

Tiktaalik 7y ago

> But I always find the term "Indigenous" weird, because we all came from somewhere Right but of course there is a difference between coming to NA less than 200 years ago and 15,000++ years ago. When settlers arrived in North America, Indigenous Nations in North America were systematically stripped of their lands and titles and worse. In Canada at least the notion that 'everyone came from somewhere' is viewed as a settler rhetorical tactic to loosen and obfuscate Indigenous title to the land and this is not taken kindly by Indigenous persons. Consequently in Canada Indigenous people will often state that they've been in NA 'since time immemorial' or more simply 'always'. This is not scientifically likely to be true, but it's essentially a strong assertion and underlining of the fact that the land is their unceded land and that settlers are settlers to it.

jlawson 7y ago
If you apply the theory that any conquered land still eternally belongs to whoever it was conquered from, then almost everybody on Earth owes their land to someone else, since everyone is descended from conquerors. This includes the American natives, who warred and took land from each other frequently. Does place X "really belong" to tribe A, who sold it to white people? Or to tribe B, who were previously conquered by tribe A? Or to tribe C, who were conquered by tribe B even before that? And so on. It also shades quickly into nativist ideas that delegitimize immigrants since even after generations since they're not "really from" the place where they live. If white Americans aren't "really from" America, it's not hard to argue that e.g. black British aren't "really from" the UK and don't have a true right to exist there if the natives disagree. If we're going to have any coherent framework around this at all, it has to include some duration of time after which people are considered naturalized to a land. I'm inclined to say that someone who was born in a place and lived there their whole life has a natural, native right to live there. But it's definitely open to discussion. What isn't open is the idea of eternal ethnic land rights. Nor is the unspoken but commonly-applied rule that whites have no exclusive rights to any place but everyone else owns the place they live in. (The American example even ignores the complexities of settler/native interactions; it was by no means a one-sided conquest; they worked together, and traded, and involved each other in inter-white and inter-tribal conflicts on both sides for centuries. Whites acted very much like just another collection of tribes on the American political field for a long time; the only long-term diffrence was not moral at all, but simply the fact that they managed to succeed where the Lakota and Iroquois and others tried but failed.)