9 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
sweet sophistication, October 30, 2003
When I purchased "the No-Nonsense Guide to Indigenous Peoples",
I hoped to find an even-handed approach to this topic, which at times seems adrift in a sea of political correctness. In particular the Forward by Hugh Brody cautions about the dangers of 'romanticizing indigenous peoples' so I thought that I had found a serious work on this important but badly-distorted topic.I was mistaken.
The book starts out trying to define the term "indigenous people" which it realisticly acknowledges is no easy task. It then considers various stipulative and subjective definitions formed by various organizations who seek to help indigenous peoples. It overlooks however that these organizations are largely staffed and entirely funded by non-indigenous peoples which claim to speak on behalf of indigenous peoples without indicating who appointed them to do so. After considering these ideas it returns to a subjective definition that any people group
who chooses to be identified as an indigenous people constitutes an indigenous people.
From this point foreward rather than romanticize indigenous peoples, author Lotte Hughes chooses to patronize them -- excessively. In the second chapter "Colonialism and Conquest" the author goes through the standard lament of how Europeans 'invaded the lands of indigenous peoples,
and 'tried to destroy their cultures' for no better reason than spite and to demonstrate their racial superiority. This theme continues throughout the book and is spiked with undocumented jargon, insinuations, and inuendos. In the next chapter, "Land and Nature", Hughes speaks of TEK, an unfamiliar term, as the new label for 'traditional environmental knowledge'without
acknowledging the context in which it was coined and who uses it. She repeatedly implies that Europeans used disease as a form of biological warfare against indigenous peoples throughout the colonial period missing the point that the scientific concept of communicable disease is little more than 150 years old while variable resistance to diseases among different peoples is little more than 60 years known. She speaks of 'biopiracy' with Western multi-national drug corporations using exotic plants to make new pharmaceuticals without consent of the indigenous peoples or willingness to share the rewards with them, despite the point that such indigenous peoples in majority of cases were unaware of many curative properties of these plants and had never heard of the diseases that they can be used to treat. Knowledge can be compared to oil that it belongs to the place where it is found rather than to those who develop it.
Perhaps Hughes reaches her peak of patronage with a dash of absurdism when she speaks of indigenous peoples 'right to isolation'. Who decides whether any people group wants to be isolated, and with modern communications how can isolation be maintained?
Some other important issues such as 'oppression of women" do not fit neatly into her thesis so she tries to tiptoe past them as she writes "In some cultures indigenous women are in a subordinate position and enjoy few rights, though the bigger threat usually comes from the national society",(60-61) without citing any indigenous woman or feminist scholar who supports this position.
A speaker on the issue of indigenous rights, G. Chellaraj, proposes a different interpretation which can form a kind of intellectual trap. Chellaraj suggests that the whole issue of protection of indigenous rights and preserving indigenious cultures can conceal a very sophisticated racism. By protecting and preserving indigenous cultures, one keeps indigenous peoples in their 'correct place'in the forests and outside of the modern world in a position of unstated but permanent disadvantage.
When Hughes discusses her examples she steps into this trap. She speaks of how the Canadian government conspired with the Tanzanian government against the Barabaig people by developping the Tanzania Canada Wheat Project which deprived the Barabaigs of some of their traditional pastures. What she doesn't mention is that the Wheat Project was designed to provide food for hungry Tanzanian people, 99% of who are Africans. The inuendo emerges that because many African Tanzanians sought to try to
improve their lives and doing so abandonned many aspects of timeless traditional cultures they had forfeited their legitimacy. Indigenous peoples have rights, but only the rights to be 'indigenous people' and nothing else. They should remain in their forest havens and hopefully (although unrealisticly) stay beyond the reach of comparative knowledge and possibility of consequent changes forever. I do not subscribe to that perspective.
Consequently the book does little to increase knowledge or improve understanding of indigenous peoples. It follows the
well-worn roads (or perhaps trails) trying to hide behind a facade of generosity what could be quite different motives. As such it adds little to the topic of indigenous peoples, their cultures, or their rights.
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