By some estimates, 350 million people qualify as "indigenous" -- individuals bound together by their ancestry, lands, culture, language and, ultimately, self-identification. Think of Bolivia's Aymara, Canada's Inuit, Congo's Pygmy, India's "Scheduled Tribes," Laos' Hmong, New Zealand's Maori, Niger's Touareg, or the United States' Navajo. Common wisdom has it that they are among the poorest of the poor, trapped in poverty by the combined effects of their remote location, lack of education, poor health and, yes, discrimination.
There must be some truth to that: the indigenous account for only 5 percent of the World's population, but for ten percent of the World's poor. Their plight has been passionately recorded by countless academicians. A new book edited by Gillette Hall and Harry Patrinos (Indigenous Peoples, Poverty and Development, Cambridge University Press) puts passion aside and meticulously reviews the evidence from both developed and developing countries. The conclusions are eye-opening.
First, in most cases, it is true that, if you are indigenous, you are more likely to die as a child, drink unsafe water, suffer from stunting, or never enroll in primary school. The "development gap" between indigenous and non-indigenous people does not close -- and may actually get larger -- as a country gets richer. It is indeed larger in Australia and Canada than in Bangladesh and Mali.
Second, geography and discrimination are probably bigger impediments to indigenous peoples' development than lack of human capital. Yes, too few of them reach the educational level necessary to occupy well-paying jobs, and too many suffer from preventable diseases that limit how productive they can be. But education and health are of little help if you insist on living isolated from the rest of society days away from the closest market, or if you migrate to a city where racial prejudice shuts you out of the formal economy. Interestingly, globalization and the pressure it puts on local firms to attract top talent if they want to survive foreign competition, do not seem to have pushed back, let alone ended, ethnic discrimination.
Third, China drilled a hole through the idea that all indigenous peoples are "trapped" in poverty. Chinese "ethnic minorities" -- essentially, anyone that does not belong to the Han majority -- have for the past couple of decades ridden the country's wave of super-fast growth and have seen their poverty levels fall faster than the national average. Some of this was due to increased access to education and health for groups that previously lacked it. But the bulk of the improvement is due to a combination of massive public investment in regions where the indigenous happen to live, and rural minorities moving to cities where the better-paying jobs are. No magic bullet there.
Fourth, the Internet has been both good and bad for indigenous peoples. It helped them with their claim for the four "Rs" -- recognition, representation, rights and resources. Nothing beats YouTube in shaming governments into action. But the preservation of identity is more difficult when local traditions delivered orally by the old have to compete with global trends delivered online to the young. And information has facilitated migration, that is, the abandonment of the all-defining ancestral land.
Fifth, not all indigenous leaders are radical Marxists, squeaky-clean administrators, sensitive environmentalists, or human-rights advocates. If you judge by the discourse heard in the Andean mountains of Latin-America, for example, you would think that capitalism and colonialism is one and the same bad thing, that nationalization would return control of natural resources to the "original peoples", and that collective decision-making will both give equal voice to all and keep graft at bay. Well, you want to rethink this Che-Guevarian nirvana. Some indigenous nations have become conglomerates and embraced markets with gusto -- typical case: the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Others have partnered with multinationals to exploit oil or gas, like in Canada. Corruption, inefficiency and incompetence have festered in indigenous governments as much as in non-indigenous ones. And just ask indigenous women in Africa's western Sahel how much their voices are heard in public affairs -- or at all.
Finally, governments have not had much success in helping the indigenous. Well-meaning policies and projects meant for specific nations, tribes or clans quickly run into trouble. Why? Mostly because such efforts amount to pushing an elephant (a giant state bureaucracy) into a proverbial china shop (a remote village with complex social norms and its own unwritten language). Some countries, like Mexico, have opted to give cash directly to individuals that happen to be indigenous. That seems to work better. But, by and large, the indigenous gap remains difficult to shrink through public intervention. [A curiosity: even public bilingual education is said to have had little impact.]
Which brings us to the core issue: does attachment to cultural values and traditions that never change help you or hurt you in a market economy that is always changing? To find that out, we need to collect data not just on people's intellectual capacity -- things like their IQs, years of schooling and test scores -- but also on their behavioral traits -- like their openness to new experiences, conscientiousness and extroversion. In other words, we need to measure people's "non-cognitive" skills and see how they affect their ability to prosper. [What can get you a better salary: an extra year of education or always showing up to work on time? Remembering more facts or being a bit more curious? Being right or being collegial?] At the moment, very few countries invest in that kind of statistics. That's why the central question in indigenous development remains unanswered.
Follow Marcelo Giugale on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Marcelo_WB
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I could write a whole dissertation on the racist nonsense in this article, but I hope these points give people food for thought. Suffice it to say, the world bank has only ever been interested in claiming indigenous lands and resources and turning us into sources of cheap labor. That means denigrating our traditions. That means calling us corrupt and sexist and poor. That means considering a move from an abundant subsistence farm to an urban sweatshop "leaving poverty." That means telling lies like the ones in this article - which, contrary to what the author says, are not some new insights recently gleaned by economists but the same tripe we've heard for the past 500 years.
Myth 5: The author says: not all indigenous leaders are radical Marxists, squeaky-clean administrators, sensitive environmentalists, or human-rights advocates.
Fact: Gasp! We, indigenous peoples are not the romanticized stereotypes created by non-indigenous peoples -- did we claim to be? We are -- try to handle your shock -- fallible humans!! But the author is cherry picking here to promote his arguments. The Seminole tribe hardly "embraced" markets -- read up on the Seminole wars -- they valiantly resisted them for eras! Being forced into the market economy after your traditional way of life is destroyed is hardly embracing it. Nor is their - admirable - current financial success "typical." The majority of Native American tribes are poor. Some Canadian tribes are in the oil industry -- many heartily oppose it. The author, in order to backup his statement about indigenous goverments being as corrupt as non-indigenous ones whoud have to show that he has analyzed the thousands of indigenous governments - which - of course he has not. His statement is plucked from thin air. As is his claim that indigenous cultures are mysogynist which, in addition to revealing his abysmal ignorance about women in the Sahel -- an oddly small slice of the indigenous world to begin with, flies in the face of indigenous scholarship by women such as Haunani-Kay Trask, Rauna Kuokannen, Mojubaoulu Okome, Leanne Simpson, etc.
Myth 1: Tradition "never changes."
Fact: Traditin is fluid.
Myth 2: At issue is whether or not indigenous people join the market economy and how well they suceed there.
Fact: Many indigenous peoples live in what anthropologist Kirk Huffman subsistence affluence and have no desire to enter the market economy. Nor are they poor - they just don't use cash.
Myth 3: Indigenous peoples suffer from a "development gap."
Fact: Indigenous peoples suffer from colonialism. Infant and child mortality are direct results of forced development. Access to unsafe drinking water becomes a problem when the World Bank does things like privatizing water (including rainwater!) and damming traditional water sources. Stunting occurs when traditional foodways are decimated through forced displacement or the introduction of monocropping. Not enrolling in primary schooling is not necessarily a social ill -- indigenous peoples have the right to alternative means of educating their kids -- that's how they create the brilliant scientists whose ethnopharmacological knowledge gets stolen by Western pharmaceutical comapanies, for example.
Myth 4: The internet is responsible for displacement and migration.
Fact: Indigenous people migrate from their lands primarily because of displacement -- and dispersion makes tradition less sustainable. For example, tens of millions of indigenous peoples have been displaced by megadams in India. Many other indigenous peoples have been displaced by conservation parks.
Myth 5: The Seminole are a "typical" example of how indigenous peoples embrace (and suceed) in the market economy.
This article is filled with myths. I'll break a few of them down.
Myth 1: Indigenous traditions "never change."
Fact: Tradition is fluid.
Myth 2: At issue is what will help indigenous people suceed in the market economy.
Fact: Many indigenous peoples do not want to participate in the market economy, instead living lives of what anthropologist Kirk Huffman refers to as subistence affluence. Such indigenous peoples may live on less than a dollar a day - but they are not poor, making this author's use of poverty and desciption of falling poverty levels throughout the article misleading. In the author's point of view, moving from an abundant subistence farm to work in a city sweatshop or working as a servant on a resort on your traditional homelands - investment in regions where the indigenous happen to live - and barely scraping by is "rising from poverty" because now you have money unlike before.
But some first nations people are already just like us [sigh], and every year more choose to become good little capitalists who worship desert gods, just like us. And as they abandon what they are/were, the cultural genocide so fervently hoped for and implemented by government and the majority continues apace.
IMHO this disappearance of cultures, of human alternatives, is a terrible loss. Values are vanishing that we neither understand nor want to learn anything about.