Chapter 4 Tribal People 111India has identified more than 200 tribes speaking 100 languages scattered
throughout the subcontinent. These are registered as “Scheduled Tribes” (there
is also a list of “Scheduled Castes”) who are deemed to need protection and
uplift. Perhaps they benefit from the many laws intended to protect and assist
them, such as India’s version of affirmative action (actually a quota system)
that reserves seats in national and state legislatures and spaces in universities
for them, but most of these advantages prove to be better on paper than in real-
ity. The vast majority of Scheduled Tribes are among the poorest 30 percent of
the Indian population.
In the 1980s and 1990s, a new word began to be applied to tribal peoples:
indigenous. Indigenous means the original population of a territory, as Native
Americans are the indigenous people of the United States. The term began to be
used in the late 1950s when the International Labour Organization adopted a
treaty intended to protect “indigenous and tribal” populations (ILO Convention
107). The term made good sense where first applied, such as in North America
and the Amazon Basin, where the indigenous people have been for ten or twelve
thousand years, while the colonizing people have been there for a mere 200. It is
less illuminating when applied to Asia, however. The Orang Asli may have been
in Malaysia for 10,000 years, but the Malays have been there for four or five
thousand. The Malay term for themselves, bumiputera, means “sons of the soil.”
(See Kingsbury 1995; Barnes, Gray, and Kingsbury 1995; Keyes 1995.)
However, the term “indigenous” is likely to be with us for a long while,
since it is becoming the term of choice in a number of international institu-
tions, such as the World Council of Indigenous People and the United Nations
Working Group on Indigenous People, and also because minority groups in
Asia are mobilizing around the term.
These examples show the conceptual difficulties and the political stakes for
“minorities,” “tribes,” or “indigenous people” in the modern nation-state, how-
ever they are labeled. But labeling a group with an ethnic identity is not as
straightforward as it may seem. Ethnicities come and go. The rest of this chap-
ter attempts to account for the emergence of “ethnic” identities within the con-
text of historical political conditions and then looks closely at one such group,
the Hmong.Ethnic Identity
In chapter 2 we described broad linguistic groups—dialects, languages, and
language families—with very ancient origins. We hypothesized ancient “home-
lands” where ancestors speaking the protolanguage must once have lived. We
suggested that these languages are “related” to each other, which implies that
modern speakers of them are also somehow related. We traced the spread of
these families into new territories. Subgroups speaking related languages, even
if these are not mutually intelligible, are often referred to as “ethnolinguistic
groups.” Identification of such groups, however, has been a scientific enterprise