Indigenous Peoples’ Identity vs. State’s Right to Integrity: An Asia Overview

Abstract

Indigenous and tribal people groups number around 370 million people living in 70 different countries. Indigenous inhabitants are usually understood as maintaining an identity in relation to a specific territory, and tribal peoples who may share indigenous characteristics are often people forcibly resettled from another territory yet maintaining their tribal social structure. Whenever the topic of indigenous peoples’ rights is encountered in international fora, it invariably opens a discussion on state’s internal instability; and particularly, the issues of self-determination and the right to identity typically raises fears on the part of states. It is therefore worth investigating the right to identity in the context of guaranteeing state integrity. If identity is defined as the right to be someone non-identical to state citizenship, and, at the same time, as a right to be united with someone else who is in the same position, the question arises whether a legal claim might be lodged regarding one’s collective ‘independence’ of state determinations. Before any resolution to this dilemma can be proposed, however, the two conceptual sources of the potential conflict should be defined — the state and indigenous people, and next, the right to identity oneself. This topic is widely discussed by scholars and politicians in North America, but much less in Asia. This article examines issues around the definition of indigenous people as well as their role and position in a given state framework; it also attends to the problematic issue of the parameters of the state’s own identity — specifically in relation to the Asia regions.