ABSTRACT
Indigenous peoples are those ‘born in a place or region’ (OED). The term ‘aboriginal’ was coined as early as 1667 to describe the indigenous inhabitants of places encountered by European explorers, adventurers or seamen. While the terms ‘aboriginal’ and ‘aborigine’ have been used from time to time to describe the indigenous inhabitants of many settler colonies, they are now most frequently used as a shortened form of ‘Australian Aborigine’ to describe the indigenous inhabitants of Australia. The adjective ‘aboriginal’ has been more frequently used as the generic noun in recent times, the term ‘aborigine’ being considered by many to be too burdened with derogatory associations. Furthermore, the feeling that the term fails to distinguish and discriminate among the great variety of peoples who were lumped together generically as ‘aborigines’ by the colonial white settlers has been resisted with the assertion of special, local terms for different peoples and/or language groups such as the use of South-Eastern Australian terms such as ‘Koori’, Queensland terms such as ‘Murri’ and Western Australian terms such as ‘Nyoongah’. So far, though, no single term has been accepted as a general term by all the various peoples concerned, and the generic term most frequently used for the descendants of all pre-colonial indigenes is ‘Australian Aboriginal peoples’. In the Americas the term ‘aborigines’ gained currency as a generic
term for indigenous peoples as it did in Australia. Terms such as ‘Indian’ and later ‘Amerindian’, which, like Aboriginal in Australia, accrued derogatory connotations, were employed by settler-invaders (and their descendants). In the twentieth century, terms generated by indigenous peoples themselves, such as ‘First Nations’, ‘Native Americans’, have replaced the older settler-invader nomenclatures. The term has also been and is still used to describe the descendants of the earliest inhabitants of other regions, such as the ‘Orang Asli’ ofMalaysia and Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan) or the original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent now referred to as the ‘scheduled tribes’ and Andaman Islanders.
