Defining Indigenous Peoples: Historical Context and Contemporary Identity

The question of who counts as “indigenous” sounds simple, yet it has occupied international lawyers, anthropologists, and activists for nearly a century. Today, more than 476 million indigenous people live across 90 countries, accounting for around 6 per cent of the global population while speaking the overwhelming majority of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages. They are the Saami of Scandinavia, the First Nations of Canada, the Maori of New Zealand, and the Adivasis of central India. Despite this enormous diversity, indigenous communities share a common thread: they descend from the original inhabitants of a region and have often been displaced or marginalised by later settlers, colonisers, or dominant groups. Understanding how this concept took shape, and why no single legal definition has ever been agreed upon, helps explain one of the most important debates in contemporary politics and international relations.

The basic idea behind indigeneity 🔗

At its core, the term “indigenous peoples” refers to the descendants of those who inhabited a country or geographical region before others arrived, conquered, colonised, or established new state structures. These communities maintain distinct cultural, social, economic, and political characteristics that set them apart from the dominant society around them. They are typically non-dominant groups, meaning they hold relatively little power within the modern states that now govern their ancestral lands.

Several recurring features define indigenous communities across the world. They share a historical continuity with pre-colonial or pre-settler societies. They maintain a strong connection to specific territories and the natural resources within them. They preserve distinct languages, cultures, knowledge systems, and beliefs. And crucially, they are determined to transmit their ancestral lands and ethnic identity to future generations. The United Nations describes indigenous peoples as inheritors of unique cultures who have retained social and political characteristics distinct from the mainstream societies in which they live.

This is not merely an academic classification. Indigenous communities are among the most vulnerable populations on the planet. Although they make up roughly 6 per cent of the world’s people, they account for nearly 19 per cent of those living in extreme poverty, and they are about three times more likely to live in extreme poverty than non-indigenous people.

The International Labour Organisation and the birth of the term 🔗

The international concern for indigenous peoples did not begin with human rights activism. It began with labour. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), established in 1919 and the only specialised agency of the United Nations dealing with labour standards, became the first international body to address the conditions of indigenous and tribal workers. By the 1950s, it had become clear that the exploitation these workers faced was rooted in deeper injustices tied to identity, language, culture, and land.

Convention 107 of 1957 🔗

In 1957, the ILO adopted the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention, known as Convention No. 107. This was the first international treaty entirely devoted to the rights of indigenous peoples, and it marked an important milestone simply by recognising that these communities deserved international protection.

However, Convention 107 carried the assumptions of its era. It was built on an assimilationist approach, treating integration into the dominant society as the natural and desirable future for indigenous peoples. The convention assumed that decisions about indigenous development should be made by others, not by the communities themselves. It also classified indigenous populations as a sub-category of “tribal” peoples and used the rather clinical word “populations” rather than “peoples.” By 1986, an expert committee convened by the ILO concluded that this integrationist outlook had become obsolete and harmful in the modern world.

Convention 169 of 1989 🔗

This recognition led the ILO to revise its earlier work, and in 1989 it adopted the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, Convention No. 169. This remains the most important binding international treaty specifically protecting the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, and the only one still open to ratification.

Convention 169 shifted the entire philosophy. Instead of pushing assimilation, it recognised the aspirations of indigenous peoples to exercise control over their own institutions, ways of life, and economic development while maintaining their identities, languages, and religions within the states where they live. The convention made participation and consultation its cornerstone, requiring governments to consult indigenous communities on decisions that affect them. Most importantly, Article 1 established self-identification as a fundamental criterion for determining who is indigenous. In other words, a community’s own sense of identity, rather than a government label, became central to the definition.

The change in language mattered too. Convention 169 separated indigenous and tribal peoples into two distinct categories rather than treating one as a subset of the other, and it used the word “peoples” to acknowledge them as collective groups with a shared identity. One limitation worth noting: India ratified the older Convention 107 but has declined to ratify Convention 169, a point we will return to.

The Martínez Cobo study and the United Nations approach 🔗

While the ILO worked on its conventions, the United Nations developed its own influential understanding of indigeneity. The turning point was a landmark study conducted by José Martínez Cobo, a Special Rapporteur appointed by the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. Completed in the mid-1980s, the Martínez Cobo study on discrimination against indigenous populations produced what remains the most widely cited working definition of the term.

According to this study, indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from the other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories. They form non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and pass on their ancestral territories and ethnic identity to future generations.

The study introduced a powerful two-level test for identifying indigenous identity. At the individual level, a person is indigenous if they identify themselves as belonging to an indigenous community (self-identification or group consciousness) and are recognised and accepted by that community as one of its members. This preserves the community’s sovereign right to decide who belongs to it without external interference. The genius of this approach is that it places the power to define indigeneity in the hands of indigenous peoples themselves rather than governments or outside experts.

Why there is no single official definition 🔗

One striking feature of international law is that no universally accepted, legally binding definition of “indigenous peoples” exists. When the UN adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, it deliberately chose not to include a definition.

This was not an oversight. The drafters reasoned that the right to identify an indigenous people belongs to that people itself, as a fundamental element of the right to self-determination. Given the enormous diversity of indigenous communities and the troubled histories of states that have denied their existence, the UN concluded that a rigid definition might exclude legitimate communities or be misused. As the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights explains, this decision was intentional and rooted in respect for self-identification. Instead of a fixed definition, the international community works with a flexible “modern understanding” built around the characteristics outlined by Martínez Cobo and the ILO.

Many names across the world 🔗

One reason a single definition is so difficult is that indigenous peoples are known by an extraordinary range of names, each reflecting local history and identity. These different terms all point toward the same underlying idea: the first or original inhabitants of a land.

In Europe, the Saami people inhabit the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and parts of Russia. In North America, indigenous communities in Canada are widely known as First Nations, alongside the Inuit and Métis, while in the United States they are often called Native Americans. In Greenland, the indigenous Inuit population calls itself Kalaallit and their homeland Kalaallit Nunaat. In New Zealand, the indigenous people are the Maori, and in Australia they are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Across these regions, terms such as “aboriginal,” “native,” and “first peoples” circulate, all carrying the sense of original belonging to the land.

The Indian context: Adivasis and Scheduled Tribes 🔗

In India, the situation carries its own complexity. The country has some 705 ethnic groups officially listed as Scheduled Tribes, with an estimated population of around 104 million people, comprising roughly 8.6 per cent of the national population. In central India, these Scheduled Tribes are commonly referred to as Adivasis, a Sanskrit-derived word that literally means “original inhabitants.”

The largest concentrations of these communities are found in the seven states of north-east India and in the so-called “central tribal belt” that stretches from Rajasthan through Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh to West Bengal. Many of these groups maintain distinct languages, religions, and forms of self-government, along with a deep attachment to their land. The Indian Constitution provides specific safeguards for them, including the Fifth Schedule for tribal areas in central India and the Sixth Schedule for certain regions in the north-east.

Yet India has consistently declined to formally accept the international category of “indigenous peoples” for its Scheduled Tribes. The government’s official position, maintained at UN forums, is that after independence essentially the entire population of India is indigenous to the country, and that the Scheduled Tribes are therefore not equivalent to indigenous peoples in the international sense. This stance helps explain why India ratified the older ILO Convention 107 but has refused to ratify Convention 169. It is a useful reminder that the definition of indigeneity is not just an academic matter; it is deeply political, with significant consequences for land rights, recognition, and self-determination.

Why the definition matters in international relations 🔗

The way we define indigenous peoples shapes who receives legal protection, whose land rights are recognised, and whose voices are heard in decisions about development and natural resources. Indigenous communities manage or hold tenure rights to roughly one-fifth of the world’s land surface, an area that contains a significant share of the planet’s remaining biodiversity and intact forests, according to the World Bank. Their stewardship of these lands has real consequences for global environmental health.

The shift from the assimilationist logic of 1957 to the self-determination logic of 1989 and 2007 reflects a broader transformation in how the international community thinks about identity, sovereignty, and historical injustice. By placing self-identification at the heart of the concept, international law has tried to undo a long pattern in which outsiders decided who indigenous peoples were and what their future should be. The contested nature of the term, especially in countries like India, shows that these debates are far from settled.

What do you think? Should the right to define who is “indigenous” rest entirely with the communities themselves through self-identification, or do governments have a legitimate role in setting criteria? And in a country as historically layered as India, how should we balance the claim that “all Indians are indigenous” against the distinct identities and land rights of Adivasi communities?

References

1. https://www.un.org/en/fight-racism/vulnerable-groups/indigenous-peoples
2. https://www.ohchr.org/en/indigenous-peoples/about-indigenous-peoples-and-human-rights
3. https://libguides.ilo.org/indigenous-peoples-en
4. https://www.ilo.org/resource/convention-169-and-international-day-worlds-indigenous-people
5. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/indigenous-and-tribal-peoples-convention-1989-no-169
6. https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/publications/martinez-cobo-study.html
7. https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/SOWIP/en/SOWIP_introduction.pdf
8. https://iwgia.org/en/india.html
9. https://minorityrights.org/resources/the-adivasis-of-india/
10. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/indigenouspeoples