Preservation of Indigenous Cultures

Abstract

Indigenous culture and language are preserved through various means, from efforts to keep the culture and its artifacts in use to curation by the museum and cultural heritage industry. Culture consists of both material objects and non-material practices and beliefs, including language. Indigenous peoples face specific challenges in protecting their culture, including economic problems and pressures to assimilate into dominant colonizing cultures. They can be marginalized even by efforts to preserve their culture.

Overview

While "indigenous people" means simply the earliest surviving population of a given region, the term is especially used to describe groups around the world that have specific things in common: geographical, cultural, or political displacement by a later-settling population; risk to self-rule; and, often, a maintenance of cultural traditions associated with pre-colonial history. Indigenous groups include the Native Americans and Alaska Natives of the United States and Canada, the Assyrians of northern Iraq, the native Siberians conquered by Russia in its eastward expansion, the Cham and Degar peoples of Vietnam, the Maori of New Zealand, and the Indigenous Australians, which includes the many nations of the Aboriginal Australians and the Torres Strait Islanders.

A common experience of most indigenous populations is persecution in reaction to resistance to cultural colonization. Pressure to assimilate to the dominant culture has historically been enforced by law. In the United States, for example, boarding schools were instituted to "Americanize" the children of tribes who were perceived as resisting assimilation. The children were removed from their families and tribes and forbidden to use their first language or any practice associated with tribal culture. Forced assimilation, however, is rarely if ever accompanied by inclusion, and indigenous people the world over share the experience of being treated as outsiders or perpetual foreigners by the colonizing culture.

Attitudes toward assimilation are colored by usually violent historical relationships between indigenous peoples and the dominant culture. Even countries that have at times made concerted efforts to cope with the effects of racism—as with the United States' acceptance of wrongdoing in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II—have particular difficulty in confronting and negotiating just solutions in regard to their indigenous populations. It is in the face of these challenges that indigenous peoples, allies, and scholars work to preserve indigenous culture.

Material culture consists of the physical elements of a culture and the ways in which members of the culture interact with them, including any special meaning, practices, traditions, or rituals attached to or using those elements. Sacred spaces, for example, are found in most cultures and include buildings of special significance or religious purpose, shrines and monuments, and natural features. Material culture would include both the physical aspects of such spaces, the uses to which the space is put, and any traditions or beliefs surrounding it. Material culture studies, a subfield of anthropology and history, explores why a thing was made or put to use by a culture, and the social, symbolic, and practical needs it serves.

Non-material culture is what many laypeople mean when they talk about culture, in that it consists of the intangible elements of a culture, including beliefs, values, and norms of behavior, intangible art (stories, poetry, music), law, traditions, knowledge, and language. Language is especially important in terms of preservation, since fluency in an indigenous people's native language often declines over generations, as a result of assimilation and a lack of access to formal language education. Without fluency in the language in which a culture is expressed, much of many indigenous cultures remains unavailable or more difficult to engage with.

When outsiders—that is, members of the dominant culture—are involved in preserving indigenous culture, there are certain basic ethical guidelines that are followed, chief among them minimization of intervention and complete documentation. For instance, artworks and historical sites may be restored using industry-standard methods designed to restore function or aesthetic to the artifact while retaining authenticity. Native language, when possible, should remain primarily the "work" of native speakers. For instance, when new words are needed for modern concepts, from Internet and iPad to opioid and diabetes, they should be contributed by native speakers rather than invented by outsiders. Ideally, this should also be true for attempts to codify the rules of grammar of a given language; early work, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was often done by outsider scholars, thereby introducing problems of authenticity.

Indigenous culture is preserved both outside the culture, such as in museums, galleries, and other exhibition spaces, and among the people themselves through various programs and less formal endeavors. Scholars and other professionals can offer valuable assistance in efforts to restore material culture or preserve it from harm by weathering and other impacts of age, while linguists and educational professionals develop best practices for educating both the in-group and out-group about non-material culture.

Further Insights

Indigenous cultures are frequently the object of study for ethnographers. Ethnography (from the Greek words for "people" and "writing") is the study of cultures and cultural phenomena; classically, "an ethnography" was a systematic field study of a given people. Like its parent field, anthropology, ethnography owes its origins to cultural imperialism. As the social sciences developed alongside the development of trains, automobiles, ocean liners, and eventually airplanes, researchers from nations of the West used the remote peoples of colonized nations as their subjects of study. Often such studies were conducted from an inherently racist and imperialist framework. The advanced technological achievements of white European cultures served as "evidence" of a superior white culture, for instance, and other cultures were studied with the implicit (or explicit) understanding that they were inherently inferior.

This framework could take several forms: it could pose the question of why one culture "succeeded" where another did not; or it could posit that the indigenous culture was in some sense "closer to nature" than the white European culture, often meaning that it was supposed to be similar in some meaningful way to the ancestors of contemporary white cultures, and thus offer clues as to the development of the researcher's own culture. The stereotype of the "noble savage," an indigenous person whose inherent goodness was revealed by, and made possible by, the fact that they were not "civilized," informed much of the early work in the social sciences.

At the other end of the spectrum of stereotypes was the assumption that "primitive" peoples—peoples who had not developed civilizations recognizably similar to contemporary Europe—led lives that were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," the list of descriptors Thomas Hobbes uses in his conception of a pre-civilization "state of nature" in his influential work, Leviathan (1651).

These two stereotypes serve different ends. The idea of the noble savage supports critiques of contemporary civilization as the source of social and moral ills, whereas the Hobbesian view justifies the need for a strong state to subjugate the natural brutality of humankind. Further, the noble savage characterization is more an infantilization than a portrait of a moral being: a false construction based in an idealization of childlike innocence—and ignorance—as in Charles Dickens' description of the Inuit people of Alaska as "loving children of the north" who were "forever happy."

The racist and imperialist origins of the social sciences' interactions with indigenous peoples are important and continue to be relevant to the social sciences in the twenty-first century. Ethnographers, nevertheless, are important players in efforts to preserve indigenous culture. Their work contributes to identifying and describing cultures, benefiting all interested parties. Critical ethnography is a subspecialty that specifically advocates for marginalized groups rather than limiting itself to neutral observation. The exploitation of indigenous peoples and the destruction wrought on their cultures is a prominent area of focus for critical ethnography, and critical ethnographers also work within the fields of social work, criminology, linguistics, economics, public policy, and urban planning, where they can act as advocates for indigenous peoples.

Repatriation. One of the most controversial areas of concern—in ethnography and in popular culture worldwide—is the question of who owns cultural products. For many, the simple answer is the culture that produced them. The world, however, has a lengthy history of exploitation and subjugation of indigenous peoples, one result of which is that the cultural products produced by one culture may be in the physical possession of members of another culture.

Violent conflicts have always resulted in "spoils," or the looting of the conquered by the conquerors. Western museums contain thousands of sacred, historical, or otherwise important cultural objects taken by force or cunning from their original settings. In many cases, the means by which objects were initially acquired were not retained in the historical record.

The repatriation of cultural artifacts is the return of works of art, archaeological remains, and other items to the culture from which they were taken. Opponents of repatriation argue that the safety and stewardship bestowed on cultural objects, especially ancient artifacts, justifies their retention by Western institutions. Further, without such "looting," many important artifacts would likely have remained uncovered by archeological investigation, and the knowledge and understanding derived from the study of such objects could not be disseminated. In some cases, the modern culture claiming ownership of an artifact is only distantly related to the culture in which the artifact originated, raising questions of legitimate ownership.

The looting of cultural artifacts, however, is inextricable from colonialism and imperialism. Around the world for much of human history, the attempt to settle in a new place went hand in hand with attempting to wipe out the culture of its inhabitants, whether through genocide, assimilation, or displacement. In the twenty-first century, laws and agreements have been drafted to rectify at least the most notorious and provable instances of cultural theft. Nevertheless, it is not a coincidence that when museums have agreed to repatriate some of their artifacts, the ones they have insisted on retaining have been the most famous or valuable.

Intellectual Property Rights. Closely connected to repatriation is the question of intellectual property rights over cultural product. Indigenous intellectual property law is a predominantly western legal tradition dealing with indigenous peoples' legal claims to cultural knowledge and non-material cultural artifacts. Since the 1990s in particular, Native Americans and representatives of various indigenous cultures around the world have asserted their right to protect and control the dissemination of their cultural property.

In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Native Americans, for example, have protested the exploitation of tribal knowledge by self-proclaimed spiritual leaders ("plastic shamans"). Representatives of the Hopi and Apache demanded in 1994 that American museums stop displaying works associated with their nations. And in 2001, representatives of Maori tribes sued LEGO for appropriating Maori language and folklore for its Bionicle line of toys, a suit which ended with a settlement.

Issues

Tourism and Fetishism. Heritage tourism is tourism in which the cultural heritage surrounding a location is part of the appeal of that location as a tourist destination. It is closely connected to cultural tourism, the practice of exploring or engaging with the culture of a location being visited, although while cultural tourism encompasses visits to museums and galleries, heritage tourism is more likely to center on sites that are historically or currently relevant to a culture, from tours of Elvis Presley and George Washington's residences at Graceland and Mount Vernon to tours of the pyramids in Egypt.

Heritage tourism is frequently one of the only ways residents of one country interact with the indigenous populations of another. The publicity surrounding the Mayan Long Count Calendar in 2012 led to greatly increased tourism to Mayan sites in Mexico in the early 2010s, for instance; significantly, the indigenous Maya of the region saw few benefits from the boost in tourism, despite having produced the culture that attracted the tourists.

The Mayan Calendar boom exacerbated a problem the Maya have long faced, not only in Mexico but in Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, and Honduras. While cultural tourism accounts for much of the incoming money in Maya-populated regions, and provides the opportunity for the sale of indigenous-made goods as well as tourism industry jobs for indigenous people, it also results in a phenomenon scholars have called "Mayanizing," whereby historical elements of the culture are played up, or fetishized, by tour operators and other agents of the industry. The result is a disparity between the real-world contemporary Mayan peoples and an idealized or fictionalized Maya of history.

Additionally, the short-term financial gains provided by the tourism industry may not be enough to offset the environmental damage caused by additional activity or the fact that important Maya spaces may be made unavailable to the Maya themselves as they are repurposed as tourist attractions. These same problems are faced by indigenous populations all over the world, perhaps especially those that live in parts of the world that provide some climatic or geographic feature that is appealing to tourism.

Living History v. Still Here. Heritage tourism is sometimes assisted by heritage interpretation: a methodology for giving visitors to a culturally significant location the relevant information about that location. Museums and galleries are engaged in heritage interpretation with respect to their exhibits, and tourist spots may include a range of interpretation devices from simple signage or brochures containing the information to reenactors in period-appropriate dress. Since the early 2000s, the thematic approach to interpretation has been adopted as the best practice for the field in the United States. Thematic interpretation focuses on a central theme for the information being conveyed, especially one related to social justice or environmental concerns.

Living history is an interactive performance used not only by living history museums, but also at many historic and culturally significant sites, where actors in period-appropriate clothing educate the public about the topic of the site, often while "staying in character." Living history programs may include reenactments of historical events, but often simply demonstrate everyday activities typical of the era, and has the goal of teaching the public about a period in history through immersion. Living history dates to the early twentieth century, when the rapid changes of modernism and migration increased the public's interest in maintaining ties to and knowledge of their own history. Living history, however, puts native interpreters in a position that is at best awkward.

Many indigenous populations, including tribes in the United States and Canada and the Maya of Central America, are sometimes imagined as belonging more properly to the past than to a country's present or future. Museums can exacerbate this. In developing exhibits intended to educate the public about the past of indigenous Americans, curators more often than not cut off their narrative in some previous century, failing to "finish the story." Native Americans, for example, cease to be of interest in a museum context after, say, the end of the Indian Wars. This is consistent with the education industry's approach to Native history as well, with Native history from the twentieth century onward almost entirely absent in every set of K-12 standards. College courses on the topic are in most states taught only to history majors or other specialists.

Terms & Concepts

Cultural Heritage: The legacy inherited by a society from previous generations, including both tangible elements (art, artifacts, buildings and monuments) and intangible elements (language, knowledge, traditions).

Cultural Preservation: The protection of cultural heritage, including but not limited to language and material culture; sometimes called cultural conservation, particularly in Europe.

Indigenous: Indigenous people are the first or earliest surviving settlers of a given place; indigenous populations did not necessarily "originate" in a place, as with the Aboriginal Australians' early settlement of Australia, but occupied it long enough to have developed a culture endemic to it previous to the arrival of later colonizing powers.

Living History: A method of teaching the public about a historical era through immersion, involving actors in period dress in a real or reconstructed historical site. The portrayal of Native Americans during certain historical periods and events can present challenges to actors and organizers who hope to avoid racist or historically one-sided accounts.

Material Culture: The physical elements of culture, as well as the ways in which the people of a culture interact with those elements.

Repatriation: The process of returning a thing or person to its place of origin.

Bibliography

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Suggested Reading

Kitchenham, A. (2013). The preservation of Canadian indigenous language and culture through educational technology. Alternative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 9(4), 351–364.

Mandelman, A. (2014). Unstrategic essentialism: Material culture and Hawaiian articulations of indigeneity. Social & Cultural Geography, 15(2), 172–200. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=94318740&site=ehost-live

Seow, F. (2015). Indigenous Communities and Indigenous Children. International Journal of Children's Rights, 23(4), 844–866. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=112125522&site=ehost-live

Valerievich, P. V. (2012). The indigenous peoples on a way of sustainable development: Traditional wildlife-use and the problems of natural and cultural heritage preserving (the experience of Altai-Sayan ecoregion). Modern Research of Social Problems, (3), 497–513. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=74742380&site=ehost-live