ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the main debates regarding indigeneity in Southeast Asia, including those related to how best to identify Indigenous peoples. It outlines various challenges and obstacles associated with the long, tedious, expensive, demeaning, and in some cases ultimately unsatisfactory, efforts of Indigenous communities to register and then obtain communal land titles. The concept of Indigenous peoples is attractive to many peoples in Southeast Asia for various reasons, particularly because it is seen as potentially empowering for those who have been and are being oppressed and colonised by others. It can bring diverse groups of people with unique languages and cultures together in inspiring ways. In 2001, the government of Cambodia, with support from international non-governmental organisations operating there and academics from outside of Cambodia, adopted a new land law. This was the first time that the existence of Indigenous peoples was legally recognised by the government.
