ABSTRACT
In the official organs of the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), this question is answered in terms of descent. Thus the document cited above goes on to explain, in the same passage, that indigenous peoples ‘are the descendants – according to one definition – of those who inhabited a country or a geographical region at the time when people of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived’.2 This answer, however, introduces paradoxes of its own. For the descendants of these prior inhabitants of the country need no longer live there. Indeed in many cases a substantial majority do not. The very idea that originality can be passed on by descent, along chains of genealogical connection, seems to imply that it is a property of persons that can be transmitted, rather like a legacy or endowment, independently of their habitation of the land. On the other hand, this very habitation is claimed as the root source of aboriginal identity. How, then, can an identity that lies in people’s belonging to the land reappear as a property that belongs to them? There is a profound contradiction here, which it is my purpose in this article to explore. It turns, as I shall argue, on the interpretation of five terms that have been central to the debate on indigenous peoples, as conducted by academics, policy-makers substance, memory and land.
