ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the interpretation of five terms that have been central to the debate on indigenous peoples, as conducted by academics, policy-makers and representative organisations of the peoples themselves. They are: ancestry, generation, substance, memory and land. The chapter shows that the meanings of these terms are linked, within this debate, by way of their common grounding in the ‘genealogical model’. But in separating the descent-line from the life-line, the genealogical model also divorces time from being. The chapter suggests an alternative, relational approach to interpreting the five key terms which is more consonant with these people’s lived experience of inhabiting the land. In this approach, both cultural knowledge and bodily substance are seen to undergo continuous generation in the context of an ongoing engagement with the land and with the beings – human and non-human – that dwell therein.
