Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity

How does settler-colonial imperialism operate in Asia, and what are the ways in which Asian Indigeneities become mobilised? To address this question, in 2017, I brought together scholars who are observing various settler-colonial and imperial dynamics and developments across Asia for a panel discussion titled ‘Asian Settler-Colonialisms and Indigeneities’ at the 116th annual American Anthropological Association conference. At that time, scholarly considerations about Asian land and resource extraction emphasised capitalism, development, and governmentality, with scant consideration of settler colonialism, even though the last remains a vital framework for understanding the structural nature of imperial projects (Wolfe 2006). Even the literature that adopted this frame drew its analysis primarily from Euro-American–centred examples, implicitly suggesting that settler colonialism is an innately Western phenomenon (Pels 1997). Yet, capitalist developments with imperial consequences continue to impact Asia at varying scales (Tsing 2005). Such contemporary developments, alongside long Asian imperial histories, including those of China, Japan, and India, complicate this assumption. This provokes questions such as: How does settler domination work when those involved in it are neither white nor from the West? How can we critically engage with this while not Orientalising this history as a cultural peculiarity or delinking it from the deep influence of Western empires?

With these questions in mind, I drew from recent innovative scholarship in anthropology, Native studies, and ethnic studies to bring attention to the potential of interdisciplinary approaches for rethinking Asian settler colonialisms and indigeneities. For example, how might North American–centred settler-colonialism literature complicate relationships between Asian nation-states and their ‘Indigenous’ populations, especially when the latter, for a multitude of reasons, often do not identify as, nor are categorised as, Indigenous?

In my intervention on that panel I focused on the question: ‘Are Tibetans Indigenous?’ Since I made this article available to the public on the popular online Tibetan platform Lhakar Diaries in 2017, my intervention has influenced other scholars to ask similar questions, including regarding Uyghurs (Musapir and Roberts 2022). Settler colonialism as a topic of interest was even raised at the 2024 Asian American Studies conference.

While these developments are encouraging, the central critique I raised in my 2017 article remains valid. As researchers, we should not concern ourselves with whether a group of people do or do not identify as Indigenous. Instead, scholars must highlight the political stakes as well as the potentiality of why a group of people would or would not identify as Indigenous. Doing so will allow researchers to highlight indigeneity as a political concept constructed and contested between settler-colonial governmentalities and Indigenous anticolonial sovereignty movements.

As I stated in my 2017 article, the stakes and potentials of indigeneity as a political category are what concern Tibetans. I highlight why Tibetans in exile rejected and later accepted identification with indigeneity due to the concept’s changing political meanings. Such contestations over the political translation and meaning of indigeneity between settler states and First Nations’ anticolonial land-return movements highlight legal arguments over sovereignty. This is what my article stresses: that although indigeneity as a racial terminology was invented by settler-colonial imperial governmentalities in North America to take possession of First Nations territories and govern their bodies, Indigenous sovereignty movements have redefined and decolonised such racialised renderings to highlight their political potentiality regarding regaining sovereignty. This contestation is what I argue highlights the politicised nature of translating indigeneity.

Hopefully, this clarification will serve as a reminder to those presently considering indigeneity and settler colonialism as an analytic for certain dynamics in Asia to highlight the political stakes and potentialities of translating indigeneity. The terminology of indigeneity may serve as a signifier for ‘the native’ but its political mobilisation between settler-colonial imperial governmentalities and Indigenous anticolonial sovereignty movements highlights how this contestation involves the right to define territorial sovereignty. With this interest in mind, I reintroduce this article for the broader audience of the Made in China Journal.

Indigeneity in the Tibetan Context

Are Tibetans Indigenous? It depends on whom you ask. Although the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) recognised the rights of Indigenous peoples by voting in favour of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 (United Nations General Assembly 2007), it also claims there are no Indigenous populations in China. Rather, Tibetans are categorised as minzu (民族, ‘ethnic nationality/minority’) within the PRC. Tibetans have often been framed as Indigenous by non-Tibetan photographers, writers, or journalists in popular print media. But what about Tibetans? Do they identify as such?

In Emily Yeh’s 2007 article ‘Tibetan Indigeneity’, she engages with the question in the Tibetan context. She argues that the framing of Tibetans as Indigenous has largely been imposed by Western and Chinese environmentalists due to Tibetan assertions of environmental stewardship and ecological wisdom. However, Tibetans in exile, according to Yeh, have largely rejected identification with indigeneity due to the term’s limitations, as they understood it as ‘sovereignty without separate statehood or national inclusion in a multicultural nation’ (Yeh 2007: 79), which limited the possibility of a future separation from China. For Tibetans living in the PRC, the limitation of indigeneity manifests as their classification as minzu under the Chinese State. According to the PRC Government, the Chinese population comprises 56 minzu groups. These include both Han Chinese and Tibetans, which makes it legally impossible for Tibetans in Tibet to identify as Indigenous. However, Yeh does not dismiss the possibility of a change in the Tibetan stance on indigeneity as she acknowledges shifts in the category.

In this essay, I will emphasise such shifts to propose indigeneity as an evolving terminology with translations that fluctuate through time and with political consequences depending on who is doing the defining. I use Tibetan rejection of indigeneity in the late 1990s to illustrate this fact. This will involve an analysis of indigeneity as a legal and theoretical concept defined and contested between settler states and Indigenous movements.

Tibetan Rejection of Indigeneity: Rights versus Sovereignty

If the terms ‘Indigenous’, ‘Native’, or ‘Indian’ emerged in tandem with settler colonialism in North America, they were a colonial construct. This is stressed by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015), who argues that the category of ‘Indian’ was invented by the settler government during colonial invasion of native territories. According to mainstream Indigenous discourse, before colonial invasion, no-one introduced themselves to another as ‘native’. Rather, many identified and continue to identify based intersectionally on the names of their familial clans, tribes, and/or homelands. Similarly, before the Chinese invasion and annexation of Tibet, Tibetans identified themselves based on their family clan names, hometowns, or regions. No-one went around introducing themselves as native.

The word ‘indigene’ is Portuguese and means ‘native’ to the land. However, under settler invasion of Indigenous lands, the category of the ‘native’ or ‘Indian’ assumed new meanings with legal and discursive consequences, argues Moreton-Robinson (2015). Settler states framed Indigenous peoples as backward and incapable of producing surplus value from their land, thus presenting them as primitive and/or other in need of modern civilising interventions. These reformulations are what, according to Moreton-Robinson, provided settler states with the legal and discursive bases for taking native territories.

In other words, these reformulations of Indigenous peoples as racialised, backwards ‘native’ or ‘Indian’ subjects by settler invading states had no real implication for how tribes identified themselves and did not acknowledge their longstanding histories as sovereign territorial nations. Rather, the construction of this racial category in the colonies provided settler states with the legal justification for taking possession of native lands and bodies in the interest of European empires. Thus, early political concepts of indigeneity revolved around settler-state definitions, which were themselves informed by doctrinal debates within the Catholic Church. Such definitions sought to racially define and accord new meanings to Indigenous peoples within settler-state hierarchies that granted Indigenous populations rights to their own previously sovereign lands and lifeways.

In Tibet, Tibetans were racialised as a backward ‘other’ under the late Qing Empire. However, after the revolution, the Republican government constructed Tibetans in the national imagination of China as ‘primitive’ Chinese to justify the territorial incorporation of Tibet (Lokyitsang 2020). Unlike imperial Qing, who did not identify with Tibetans, the Nationalist government identified Tibetans as Chinese but as a backward group in need of modernising interventions. These nationalist reimagining of Tibetans as Chinese were not based on how Tibetans themselves identify and barely engaged Tibetan historical accounts of themselves as a distinct people separate from the Chinese. Nonetheless, this reinvention of Tibetans as ‘primitive Chinese’ was later adopted by the Communist government after it won the Civil War. Currently, racialising Tibetans under the Tibet ‘autonomous’ settler territorial governance of the current Communist government as a backward minority in need of Chinese modern civilising development provides the legal and discursive framework to justify Chinese settler elimination and/or assimilation of Tibetan lands and bodies.

As Yeh (2007) stressed, it was the confusion surrounding rights versus sovereignty that Tibetan organisational heads in exile found perplexing. For them, the political movement for Tibet seeks sovereignty through self-determination frameworks, not (settler-given) rights. According to Kahnawake Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson (2014), a rights-based politics seeks recognition from the settler-colonial state. Indigenous sovereignty refuses settler-state recognition, and instead is orientated towards Indigenous systems of authority and recognition. In other words, sovereignty becomes the basis through which Indigenous communities refuse the settler state.

To understand why Tibetans from Yeh’s discussion refused the categorisation of indigeneity, it is essential to consider how they understood the term. The Tibetan diaspora, including their government in exile—on which Yeh chose to focus—is based in India. Their understanding of indigeneity is thus partially influenced by how their host country defines the concept. To explain this, I turn to Sara Shneiderman’s 2009 ‘Rituals of Ethnicity’, in which she considers Thangmi performances of indigeneity in Darjeeling, India, in accordance with the Indian State’s definition. In particular, Shneiderman explores the ways in which Thangmi leaders struggled to perform a version of Thangminess that would qualify them under India’s category of ‘Other Backwards Classes’ (OBC) in the 1990s.

India’s OBC category is inherited from the British Raj and is reserved for groups that consider themselves ‘native’ to a province. State recognition as OBC allows groups to access certain state-given rights reserved for groups that the state identifies as Indigenous. For Thangmis to qualify as OBC, they must also accept being classified as ‘backwards’ (Shneiderman 2009: 143). Alongside performing traditional and ritual versions of themselves, Thangmis felt compelled to perform forms of backwardness that they thought would help their OBC qualification. For example, during their bid for OBC status, Thangmi leaders asked community members to begin consuming rats because an early ethnographic book on Thangmis stressed how rats were considered a staple in traditional Thangmi food. This was despite Thangmi ethnologists who debunked this assumption by pointing out that rats were consumed not because of tradition but because of a particularly bad time when crops failed and starvation prevailed.

Alongside the OBC category, India also classifies specific groups under the Schedule Tribe category. For instance, ethnic Tibetan groups living along the current border between Tibet and India are recognised officially by India as ‘Bhutias’, who, in turn, are categorised as a ‘Scheduled Tribe’. On the one hand, the OBC category stresses indigeneity as backwards; on the other, the Scheduled Tribe category recognises groups as tribes rather than sovereign entities. For the Tibetan leadership in exile, both definitions were unacceptable. Alongside considering Indian definitions, Tibetans were also thinking about indigeneity as a legal terminology trafficked in the international arena.

The United Nations declared 1994 the ‘International Year of Indigenous Peoples’ to recognise Indigenous peoples’ ‘human rights’. According to Carole McGranahan (2016), this was the first time such a group, ‘Indigenous peoples’, was internationally named and recognised. In accordance with UN actions in the ensuing years, the Tibetan government in exile understood Indigenous peoples as tribal rather than peoples with their own sovereign territories. At the time, McGranahan was told by Tibetan government officials not to use the term ‘indigeneity’ when describing Tibetans due to this limitation.

From this vantage point, it becomes clear why the Tibetan leadership in exile rejected this terminology in the 1990s. Accepting such definitions meant acquiescing to a classification of themselves as inferior. It also degraded the Tibetan political goal of sovereignty. Rather than rejecting current understandings of indigeneity as defined by Indigenous sovereignty movements rooted in claims of sovereignty and decolonisation, Tibetans in exile were refusing indigeneity as defined by institutions such as the United Nations and modern governments, which framed indigeneity as backwards and tribal and rooted their politics in terms of rights rather than nationhood. This is what major Indigenous sovereignty movements stress: that their activism is often misconstrued as seeking civil rights from the settler state rather than challenging settler-state violations of national territorial treaties signed with First Nations peoples during the inception of settler-colonial states.

The Tibetan example demonstrates that the term indigeneity operates under different discursive frameworks depending on who is doing the defining, whether modern settler states or Indigenous nations and movements. As such, Indigenous groups’ rejection or acceptance of indigeneity as an identification depends largely on whether such definitions exclude or include sovereignty.

Indigenous Sovereignty Movements: Decolonising Indigeneity

While the term indigeneity has been defined by settler-colonial states since its inception, Indigenous movements have consistently challenged such definitions in both the discursive and the legal arenas. In so doing, they have decolonised the term to mobilise possible alliances and Indigenous anticolonial sovereignty movements that circumvent settler states and other capitalist institutions. Because the terminology was produced during settler-colonial invasion, it has become useful for Indigenous scholars to challenge the attempts by settler states to hide them under neoliberal discourses that erase settler-colonial identity and histories.

In the current era, Glen Coulthard (2014: 15) argues that articulations of setter colonialism have moved on from colonial domination to modern governmentality. In particular, he argues that the emergence of

[i]ndigenous anticolonial nationalism … force[s] colonial power to modify itself from a structure that … explicitly oriented around the genocidal exclusion/assimilation double, to one that is now reproduced through a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize our recognition and accommodation.

Regardless of this modification … the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state has remained colonial to its foundation. (Coulthard 2014: 6; emphasis added)

The result is that you have two opposing forces. On the one hand, there are settler states that seek to constantly change their systems while remaining steadfast in their original goals of eliminating indigeneity. On the other are Indigenous activists and scholars who seek to challenge such structural changes through decolonial legal and discursive interventions. Because settler-state institutions continue to use and define the terminology of indigeneity to serve their own goals, Indigenous peoples have challenged such use with their own decolonised definitions through the interrogations of treaties signed between Native Nations and settler states.

This back and forth suggests that the terminology cannot be tossed out so easily; rather, it has become a discursive site for legal contestations between common law settler states and Indigenous nations. It is a high-stakes game that involves the right to define sovereignty—a concept that Michelle H. Raheja (2015: 30) describes ‘as an open-ended process that involves critical and kinetic contemplations of what sovereignty means at different historical and paradigmatic junctures’. For Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005: 124), ‘[a]t the heart of Indigenous peoples’ realities, then, is nationhood. Their very survival depends on it.’ Indigeneity described from this vantage point is not about identification but about sovereignty.

Tibetan Acceptance of Indigeneity: Addressing Settler Colonialism

Another reason Indigenous movements and scholars have not completely thrown out the terminology is due to its salience in generating global solidarities between native peoples and their anticolonial stance against settler-state encroachment. Judging from its evolutionary trajectory, indigeneity has gone from being a colonial construct to a terminology operationalised by global Indigenous movements to advance solidarities and sovereignty claims against settler nations and capitalist institutions in cahoots.

In ‘Analytics of Indigeneity’, Maile Arvin’s (2015: 121) articulation of indigeneity ‘refers to the historical and contemporary effects of colonial and anticolonial demands and desires related to a certain land or territory and the various displacements of that place’s original or longtime inhabitants’. Arvin’s concept of indigeneity stresses colonial histories and territorial expulsion of native inhabitants—a framework Tibetan political movements in exile also stress through their insistence on Tibetan sovereignty.

It could be argued that Tibetans can identify as Indigenous; however, my purpose is not to insist whether Tibetans are in fact Indigenous. Rather, recent trends among Tibetans in exile suggest that indigeneity, as defined by Indigenous nations and movements against further encroachments on their territories by settler-colonial and imperial states and capitalist corporations, has become an important framework for considering the Tibetan political movement for sovereignty in the current moment.

Tibetans living in North America, for example, have contemplated these possible solidarities by promoting Indigenous movements such as the Idle No More in Canada and, recently, the No Dakota Access Pipeline campaign in communal spaces in the United States. These movements also became avenues for Tibetans like me to reflect on indigeneity as a decolonial praxis that could prove useful for Tibetans in addressing settler colonialisms, sovereignties, refusals, and potential solidarities.

Indigeneity and its Political Possibilities

While the Tibetan leadership in exile in the recent past has turned away from the settler-state construct of indigeneity due to its limitations when it comes to sovereignty, non-organisationally based Tibetan individuals in North America are presently considering indigeneity as defined by Indigenous movements. These inspiring movements have thus become the basis for Tibetans to address Tibet’s recent history of Communist China’s settler-colonial occupation and ongoing histories of Tibetan nationhood. This suggests indigeneity as a political terminology has been experiencing shifting re/definitions and, because of such shifts, Tibetans have in the past rejected it while they consider accepting it in the present.

So, can we assume Tibetans should in fact identify as Indigenous? It depends on the politics of such re/definitions. My point, however, is not to argue whether Tibetans do or do not identify this way. A more interesting question is to ask where, when, and why Tibetans do or do not identify as such. As I have shown, indigeneity is not just about categorising people symbolically, but also about leveraging international movements and creating strategic solidarities for native nations mobilising against the mechanics of settler governmentality. It is this political potential of indigeneity that civilian Tibetans are presently considering.

This essay was originally published in a slightly different version in Lhakar Diaries on 27 December 2017.

Featured Image: (Left) Sioux youth from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. (Right) Tibetan protester in Paris. Source: @Joe Catron (CC), @Philippe Leroyer (CC), Flickr.com.

References

Arvin, Maile. 2015. ‘Analytics of Indigeneity.’ In Native Studies Keywords, edited by Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja, 119–29. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Coulthard, Glen. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Lokyitsang, Dawa. 2020. ‘The Discursive Art of China’s Colonialism: Reconfiguring Tibetan and State Identities.’ Tibet Policy Journal 7(2): 29–50.

Lawrence, Bonita, and Enakshi Dua. 2005. ‘Decolonizing Antiracism.’ Social Justice 32(4): 120–43.

McGranahan, Carole. 2016. ‘Refusal and the Gift of Citizenship.’ Cultural Anthropology 31(3): 334–41.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Musapir, and Sean R. Roberts. 2022. ‘Should Uyghurs Be Considered an Indigenous People?’ HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12(2): 373–81.

Pels, Peter. 1997. ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 26(1): 163–83.

Raheja, Michelle H. 2015. ‘Visual Sovereignty.’ In Native Studies Keywords, edited by Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja, 25–34. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Shneiderman, Sara Beth. 2009. ‘Rituals of ethnicity: Migration, mixture, and the making of Thangmi identity across Himalayan borders.’ PhD dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

United Nations General Assembly. 2007. ‘United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.’ United Nations website. www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.’ Journal of Genocide Research 8(4): 387–409.

Yeh, Emily T. 2007. ‘Tibetan Indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake.’ In Indigenous Experience Today, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn, 69–98. London: Routledge.