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#ORFCGlobal Quite a few speakers, particularly from a natural science background, uncritically, amatuerly and homogenously invoke "indigenous" people as paragon of good land use. This reflects a mistaken 'quest for a singular, primordial authenticity'.1
#ORFCGlobal Understandably quite a few participants, who practice quality land use themselves, have taken this shallow portrayal of "indigeneity" at face value, and invoked the idea of identifying agroecological farmers in England and the like as indigenous. 2
#ORFCGlobal I will very briefly provide some learning by saying that indigenous is a political ecological term, not a nativist, naturalist or essentialist term - with a diverse history, and its own conceptual problems (wrestled with by social anthropologists for many decades). 3
#ORFCGlobal Indigenous emerges as an idea with cache when it acts as a political defense against exploitation, by taking on some nativist tropes such as conversion of 'indigenous` culture into copyright property, in order to resist private property regimes. 4
#ORFCGlobal Indigeneity emerges out of centuries of imperial, colonial and neocolonial horrors that are in practice today. To aspire to indigeneity is somewhat fraught as it actually implies a severe history of genocide, ecocide of your home and so forth. 5
TBC
