ANNALS OF INQUIRY YOU FIRST

Does anyone really know what it means to be "Indigenous"?

- MANVIR SINGH

Identity evolves. Social categories shrink or expand, become stiffer or more elastic, more specific or more abstract. What it means to be white or Black, Indian or American, able-bodied or not shifts as we tussle over language, as new groups take on those labels and others strip them away.

On August 3, 1989, the Indigenous identity evolved. Moringe ole Parkipuny, a Maasai activist and a former member of the Tanzanian Parliament, spoke before the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, in Geneva— the first African ever to do so. “Our cultures and way of life are viewed as outmoded, inimical to national pride, and a hindrance to progress,” he said. As a result, pastoralists like the Maasai, along with hunter-gatherers, “suffer from common problems which characterize the plight of indigenous peoples throughout the world. The most fundamental rights to maintain our specific cultural identity and the land that constitutes the foundation of our existence as a people are not respected by the state and fellow citizens who belong to the mainstream population.”

Parkipuny’s speech was the culmination of an astonishing ascent. Born in a remote village near Tanzania’s Rift Valley, he attended school after British authorities demanded that each family “contribute” a son to be educated. His grandfather urged him to flunk out, but he refused. “I already had a sense of how Maasai were being treated,” he told the anthropologist Dorothy Hodgson in 2005. “I decided I must go on.” He eventually earned an M.A. in development studies from the University of Dar es Salaam.