This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Indigenous peoples article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4Auto-archiving period: 90 days ![]() |
|
![]() | Warning: active arbitration remedies The contentious topics procedure applies to this article. Parts of this article relate to the Arab–Israeli conflict, which is a contentious topic. Furthermore, the following rules apply when editing the parts of the page related to the contentious topic:
Editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process may be blocked or restricted by an administrator. Editors are advised to familiarise themselves with the contentious topics procedures before editing this page. If it is unclear which parts of the page are related to this contentious topic, the content in question should be marked within the wiki text by an invisible comment. If no comment is present, please ask an administrator for assistance. If in doubt it is better to assume that the content is covered. |
![]() | This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus. |
![]() | A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the On this day section on August 9, 2010. |
![]() | This ![]() It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
I would like it added in the first paragraph that we have been humans for approximately 150,000 years and that in actuality, all the indigenous peoples we know were not actually the first people in those areas and that they had conquered and wiped out the actual indigenous peoples there. For example, we consider "native americans" to be indigenous, but in reality, they just conquered and wiped out all those before them and were the 'colonists' themselves. If you choose not to add this detail, you are okay with the current misinformation that the indigenous peoples we know today were actually the first people in any given area. Jerharris90 (talk) 23:51, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
![]() | This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Please change "encomieda" to "encomienda" in the sentence "The Spanish enslaved some of the native population and forced others to work on farms and gold mines in a system of labor called ecomienda." Second paragraph in #History; Americas. Pissypamper (talk) 00:56, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
indigenous people were here for 65,000 years 125.253.17.31 (talk) 05:43, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
@PadFoot2008 and Pinchme123: For better visibility, I will continue here with the part of our discussion in Talk:List_of_Indigenous_peoples#South_Asian_section that directly relates to the contested edits[1][2].
To make it short: none of the sources supports the blanket statement that "Dravidian people" (I assume that you mean "Dravidian-speaking peoples") are Indigenous peoples of South Asia.
Please only make use of sources that explicitly use the phrase "indigenous people(s)", and ideally sources that cover Indigenous peoples as main topic, such as the ILO report The rights of indigenous peoples in Asia. Needless to say, it does not list the Tamils, Telugu, Kanndigas and Malayalis, or makes any mention of linguistic families at all, but talks at length about "Scheduled tribes" and "Adivasi" (regardless of linguistic affiliation) in the context of Indigenous peoples of India.
(@PadFoot2008: Another thing, the Web Archive links are both dead, so I assume that you have copied them from other articles, but without further scrutiny. Had you actually read the texts by Avari and Sil before making the edit?) Austronesier (talk) 19:38, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
the Dravidian people" (singular), nor do they support the assertion that any such singular culture is the "
largest indigenous population in continental Indian subcontinent". Given the lack of support in these two, I'm certain there would at least need to be more sources provided here to demonstrate what the edit asserts.
The second major South Asian linguistic group comprises the Dravidian languages. Dravidian languages, as spoken by indigenous populations, are confined to South Asia and seem to have no links to any outside language families.
After 800 B.C. they penetrated the south of India and gradually became dominant over the whole subcontinent and its indigenous peoples. Of those, only the Dravidians of the South are clearly identifiable to us. It is not certain whether the indigenous peoples possessed a social structure with castelike elements.
As far as present evidence goes however they are indigenous to India, and perhaps specially indigenous to Southern India.
The Aryans imposed their highly stratified hierarchical social organization on the conquered Dravidians, the indigenous people of south India, who began to follow the Aryan's Hindu religion and the caste system.
However, the nature of their religion is a subject of discussion, some scholars speak of monism, some of polytheism, and some even of henotheism. They subdued the indigenous Dravidians and Mundas who had probably created the advanced civilisation of the Indus Valley. Seemingly, they pushed some of the indigenous people to the south of India. By approximately 500 BC, the Aryans occupied the north of India: from present-day Pakistan to Bangladesh, from the Himalayas down to the Vindhya Range.
[t]he largest indigenous population in continental Indian subcontinent are the Dravidian peoples", for a number of reasons. First is one of phrasing: a group of peoples is not one population that can be labeled "the largest". But more importantly, none of these quotations support the statement of them being largest. The first source is about a "second major" linguistic group and clearly describes multiple populations. The source describes the linguistic group as being labeled "Dravidian" but does not claim this somehow unifies the populations themselves into an identifiable group. The second source does not make any claims about the size of "the Dravidians" relative to other indigenous groups, and this source is only an evaluation of past circumstances and not today. The third source is 122 years old (published 1902), refers to Dravidians as a "race", and qualifies its more-specific locative statement about them being indigenous to the south with "perhaps". The fourth and fifth sources do identify "the Dravidians" as a single indigenous population and locate them to south India, but again neither source supports the claim that they're "the largest indigenous population".
None of the present Dravidian-speaking ethnicities existed in their present form at that time", what (or where) is the proof for this claim of yours? That in itself is an incredibly POV-ish view in your part. There exist many tribal Dravidian-speaking ethnicities which have no Steppes ancestry at all, so how in the world does your claim make any sense? PadFoot2008 19:22, 15 June 2024 (UTC)
The second major South Asian linguistic group comprises the Dravidian languages. Dravidian languages, as spoken by indigenous populations, are confined to South Asia and seem to have no links to any outside language families. Linguistic historians have been unable to determine whether ancient Dravidian speakers were indigenous to South Asia or, like the Aryans, came from outside the subcontinent, but apparently at a much earlier date.Throughout the book, Schmidt follows this pattern in using the term "indigenous" in a relative manner in contrast to ousiders/intruders in the respective period, as I have outlined above. When talking about the colonial period (which is obviously less remote than the period of Indo-Aryan migration), he refers to all native inhabitants of South Asia as indigenous, regardless of whether they're tribal groups or urban literate elites, Dravidian, Munda or Indo-Aryan speakers, Hindus or Muslims etc. FWIW, he doesn't use the term "indigenous" in the present-day context, but this is exactly what we require here: sources that talk about contemporary indigenous peoples.
@PadFoot2008: Now we're getting somewhere. It's not that I've "completely misunderstood" you. Your text goes The largest indigenous population in continental Indian subcontinent are the Dravidian peoples. (07 June 2024)
and Numerous indigenous groups are present in South Asia. These include the Dravidian peoples. (15 June 2024)
"The Dravidian peoples" are the Dravidian-speaking peoples in toto. If this hasn't been your intent, all the better.
But at the risk of becoming repetitive: it is not a useful approach to dissect and interpret a single cherry-picked sentence from a source that employs a context-dependent use of the term "indigenous" that can result in different scopes of applicability in different historical periods. Schmidt's usage makes perfect sense for the purpose of his topic (= South Asian history), but is of little value for this article, especially when multiple sources are at hand that explicitly discuss the topic of Indigenous peoples in Asia. I've already presented one above, here is another (NGO-based) valuable open-access book: The Concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asia: A Resource Book, chapter "The Concept of Indigenous Peoples in India" (p. 223). The author describes at length the issues that come with the literal application of the word "indigenous" in the Indian context and the inadquacy of linguistic affiliation as a marker of indigeneity. He also explains why "indigenous peoples" are not simply peoples who are/were indigenous:
Today, aspects of marginalisation are built into the definition of indigenous peoples. Only those people that have been subjected to domination and subjugation have come to constitute indigenous peoples. [...] The coming of the Aryans is invariably considered the decisive historical factor to determine the “original” people of India. Yet not all the original people have been called indigenous people. The Hinduized Dravidian language speakers are without doubt also descendants of inhabitants of India who lived there before the coming of the Aryans. Yet they have never been described as indigenous peoples, mainly because they do not constitute marginalised groups.
For a handy definition, this is from a chapter by Mitra & Gupta in Land and Cultural Survival: The Communal Land Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Asia (J. Perera, ed,. 2009, ADB):
In India, the indigenous peoples are predominantly composed of the large and diverse tribal populations scattered across several states. Anthropological literature suggests that the tribal designation arose as a colonial construct, in which all those living on the margins of mainstream agrarian society but within the structure of the Hindu caste system were delineated as “primitive” and “tribal”. In Indian languages, there is no exact equivalent for the word “tribe”, but close synonyms are vanavasis (forest dwellers) or adivasi (original inhabitants).
But they add in a note:
It has been argued that the definition of indigenous peoples as “original settlers” is problematic in the Indian context. Sociologists like Dube (1977) and Beteille (1998) have pointed out that “tribal traditions themselves make repeated mention of migration of their ancestors. There is considerable evidence to suggest that several groups were pushed out of the areas that they were first settled and had to seek shelter elsewhere.”.
Last but not least, here's a source from an academic publisher that is entirely devoted to the core issue here: Indigeneity in India (Karlson & Subba, eds., 2006, Routledge). I won't quote from it, but I strongly suggest to make use of it and thus finally build the South Asia section on adequate sources that are directly tied to the topic of this article. –Austronesier (talk) 08:59, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
Given how often the subject of capitalization of "Indigenous" has been discussed here, I thought I would notify those here about the page move discussion at Talk:Genocide of Indigenous peoples#Requested move 25 May 2024. --Pinchme123 (talk) 02:57, 11 June 2024 (UTC)