In 2007 the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Its success was largely the result of the dedicated and persistent activism of indigenous social movements in the face of resolute opposition from states with indigenous populations. Although it is not legally binding, the Declaration means that the relationships between national governments and indigenous peoples can no longer be consigned to matters of ‘domestic’ policy only. The demands by members of indigenous communities for designated international rights for indigenous peoples emerged from longstanding colonial occupation, dispossession and induced transformations of distinct peoples, often justified as an inevitable consequence of modernity.

Our book underlines the connections between modernity and colonialism. In particular, it focuses on colonialism as a modern and contemporary experience. We aim to contribute to an understanding of these dynamics by examining how indigenous peoples have been dealt with under European and other types of geopolitical expansion and how they continue to be treated today as their lands are targeted for settlement, agriculture, industrialization and fossil fuel extraction. The main ideology that legitimates these modern processes is Western liberalism, a body of ideas that has most often been represented as universal and emancipatory. We attempt to show how liberal ideas are applied differentially and selectively and how they often masquerade for decidedly illiberal policies and actions. Social scientific and literary writers as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, bell hooks, Vine Deloria, Edward Said, Paul Gilroy and Enrique Dussel have extended the critique of modernity into this domain. Furthermore, numerous contemporary indigenous scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Pamela Palmater, Devon Mihesuah, Taiaiake Alfred, Glen Sean Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Leanne Simpson, Robert Warrior, James Fenelon, Dale Turner, Duane Champagne, Gerald Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko and scores of younger indigenous writers, academics, activists, and commentators are daily adding to the varied corpus of knowledge of the ongoing colonial aspects of modernity.

Our discipline, sociology, has not made the study of colonialism a priority. Instead, it has primarily looked at ‘society’ parochially from the vantage point of nineteenth-and twentieth-century theories that argued that developments such as democracy, rationalism, the state and industrialism made the West uniquely progressive. Although sociologists have examined empires, they have largely excluded indigenous societies from modernity, and indigenous scholars, writers and orators have rarely been used as sources of authority. The omission of indigenous peoples in sociology can be explained by the fact that, although many rejected elements of the social evolutionist ideology of early social science (Kurasawa 2004), they constructed ‘stages’ of human society which positioned indigenous peoples further back in history. Consequently, ‘founding fathers’ such as Weber, Durkheim and Marx made the rise of Europe their main focus (Samson and Short 2006). The study of indigenous peoples was left to anthropology and various types of natural science, including the subfield of scientific racism. These academic divisions have yet to be completely transcended. Sociologists who in the past analysed colonialism and empires have been retroactively assigned to anthropology (Steinmetz 2013: 1), and sociologists such as us are often assumed to be anthropologists simply because of our interests in indigenous societies.

The Eurocentric nature of the social sciences is of course well noted by numerous scholars around the world. It has provided an impetus for new theorizations from the ‘global South’ (Connell 2007) and attempts to reconceptualize the discipline of sociology as less parochial (Bhambra 2007; Bhambra 2014). However, while colonialism and global historical connections are forefronted, the concern in Bhambra’s important works, for example, is principally with academic disciplinary politics. The main point of contrast to European conceptualizations of modernity is the global South, a meaningless category for indigenous peoples. By contrast, scholars from indigenous communities are developing a body of literature that incorporates transcultural methodologies and indigenous knowledge. Many are creating genuinely transdisciplinary knowledge and, although located in university departments, are rejecting identification with established academic disciplines. At the same time, indigenous writers frequently affirm that academic products are not solely for the benefit of universities, the state or corporations, but are important means of promoting self-determination and control over indigenous territories and resources. Indigenous researchers have been centrally concerned with the antagonistic relationship between the Western project of modernity, its embodiment in academia, and indigenous peoples. As the Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: 62) argues: ‘The development of scientific thought, the exploration and “discovery” by Europeans of other worlds, the expansion of trade, the establishment of colonies, and the systematic colonization of indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century are all facets of the modernist project.’

A further dimension of our book is that it is global and comparative. Although living in different locations around the world and developing highly varied ways of life, indigenous peoples nonetheless are affected by similar patterns of dispossession and violence. Hence, we will highlight the features of domination, the ideologies behind them, and the effects, responses and resistance of indigenous peoples to them. While we will cover indigenous peoples in many areas of the world, it is important to caution that generalizations will always have their limitations and readers should look to specialist accounts for more detail on specific issues. Similarly, while we discuss many different indigenous groups and trace some of their histories and contemporary circumstances, we cover only a fraction of the diversity.

One of our aims is to locate indigenous peoples in a global process in order to offer an alternative to the largely national orientation of commentaries in the various literatures. A global and comparative approach will always subvert the tendency to view policies and practices as unique to particular nation-states. Looking at indigenous peoples only in national contexts reinforces the often-made assumption that they are simply administrative units within states. Frederick Hoxie’s (2008: 1154) statement that ‘historians have difficulty viewing American Indian topics apart from the history of the American state’ applies more widely. The problems and issues raised in this book are seen differently when we view patterns in different contexts. Both state policies and indigenous resistance to them in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia show striking similarities, and these are associated with the ubiquity of colonial processes. We will look at some of these dynamics by putting First and Third World countries on the same page, and rejecting the conceit of Western liberalism to be the basis of a uniquely fair, democratic and benign form of society.

Finally, the book uses colonialism to explore the relationship between modernity, the nation-state and indigenous peoples. Rather than understanding colonialism as a purely historical process, we argue that it remains crucial to the structuring of indigenous peoples’ lives today. Colonialism is a political, social, economic and cultural structure nourished by powerful drives for land and authority. It operates most transparently through nation-state institutional structures. These rely on governmental claims to dominion over distinct peoples using land dispossession, exclusion, violence and racist knowledge to consolidate and legitimate itself. There has been no meaningful decolonization applied to indigenous peoples. The decolonization movements that swept the globe in the mid-twentieth century led only to the formation of new nation-states and with them possibilities for renewed colonialism. Those who came to be called indigenous people in decolonized states were often groups depicted by political elites as practising ways of life that were outside the modernizing agenda inherited from their former colonizers. The experience of colonialism is therefore common to indigenous peoples, and dispossession of land, autonomy, and self-representation ‘continues to inform the dominant modes of Indigenous resistance and critique that this relationship has provoked’ (Coulthard 2014: 13).

This book is divided into six chapters. The first, ‘Identity’, sets the context for the understanding of indigenous peoples in the contemporary world. It introduces readers to general facts like geographical distribution, social indicators, population numbers and distinctions between the ways of life of today’s indigenous peoples by drawing on the UN report, State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (UN DESA 2009). At the same time, we will consider indigenous identity through scholarly debates on the subject as well as how identity is configured in the seminal definition elaborated by Martínez Cobo (UN ECOSOC 1986) and more recently in UNDRIP. We will then proceed to examine how the establishment of nation-states has become a profound determinant of indigenous identity. Geographical and cultural differences in conceptions of indigenous identity and the recognition of this identity will also be discussed. This will include looking at the meaning of being indigenous in settler states, where migrant populations established governments and created societies based on racial taxonomies, as well as in post-independence states, such as those in Africa and Asia that often claim that ‘everyone is indigenous’, and states like Mexico where a kind of hybrid (mestizaje) identity was embraced.

The second chapter, ‘Colonization’, examines past and present colonial ideologies and structures that affect indigenous peoples. We will summarize some of the early contact encounters and argue that, in addition to extreme violence, these were accompanied by religious, legal and philosophical representations that were carried over into subsequent relationships between colonizing and colonized peoples. While much space will be devoted to the North American experience, we aim to show in the latter part of the chapter that the experiences of many indigenous peoples in Africa, Latin America, Northern Europe and Russia, Asia and Australia are similar to those in North America and that the common factor is colonialism.

In the third chapter, ‘Land’, we turn to the actual social and cultural processes central to colonialism; the removal of indigenous peoples from their lands. This begins with an account of the enclosure policies by which indigenous peoples in North America were reduced to living on small reserves, reservations or in villages. This involves the displacement and relocation of many groups, as well as the sedentarization of mobile peoples. Crucial to these ongoing processes was the introduction of assimilation policies, prominently including wage labour and state education. We then proceed to look at the similar and contrasting dynamics involved in various colonial configurations in Latin America, Southern Africa, Scandinavia and Siberia, and Japan. We end the chapter by examining the dramatic social effects of land dispossession in other spheres of indigenous life such as gender roles, family life and the profound and painful experience of state schooling.

Chapter 4, ‘Environment’, will move the focus to the position of indigenous peoples relative to pressing concerns over the destruction of our natural world. We will begin by outlining the architecture of European and colonial thought towards nature. Fundamental to this was the belief in the necessity of transforming and controlling nature. These ideas have been channelled through the ‘development’ agenda which often pits indigenous beliefs about living in tandem with nature against the neoliberal industrial mandate to dominate it. This has resulted in a number of contemporary practices that are taking place across the globe. Because ‘the race for what’s left’ (Klare 2012) is currently being run on indigenous lands ever more remote from the main corridors of colonial expansion, land grabbing and environmental racism are making serious inroads into indigenous territories. The chapter concludes by showing how the transformation of indigenous lands also led to urbanization of many indigenous families, a policy that unites measures such as the US Relocation Acts of the 1950s and Canadian termination policies with contemporary Israeli and Chinese mandates to urbanize Bedouin and Tibetan herders respectively.

The fifth chapter, ‘Rights’, examines the relationship between indigenous peoples and rights. We will discuss the development of strategic actions of resistance centred on social mobilization, networking and alliances both at national and international levels. These led to the advancement of indigenous rights at the United Nations, which in turn has created a legal framework that indigenous peoples have used to seek justice. We will balance these advances against some serious limitations. In the current international system, rights can ultimately only be enforced by the same states that are the adversaries to indigenous peoples in the recognition of these very rights. There are tensions also between the collective rights for indigenous peoples articulated in international legal instruments and individual rights favoured by states. Some key court cases will also be discussed, involving the recognition of Free Prior and Informed Consent as a required condition for fossil fuel and other resource extraction projects in indigenous territories.

The sixth and final chapter, ‘Culture’, addresses how creative and visual arts have become a powerful platform for the articulation of indigenous identities and means to resist colonialism. This chapter looks at culture as a site of struggle in which indigenous peoples have engaged with educational institutions, museums, galleries and the film industry to articulate themselves after centuries of silencing. They have also developed their own grassroots artistic and creative stages for asserting cultural sovereignty. We conclude that their alternative visions of the world are on the side of social justice, cultural pluralism and human survival.

Lastly, it is important to situate ourselves as authors. Together,we have more than four decades of combined experience working with, visiting and writing about the impacts of colonialism on indigenous peoples as diverse as the Innu, Arapaho and Shoshone in North America, Ainu in Japan, San in Namibia, Hadzabe and Maasai in Tanzania and the Selk’nam in Tierra del Fuego. In our journeys, we have learned from the experiences of communities, indigenous and non-indigenous researchers and NGOs working in Africa, South America and Asia. We are both non-indigenous and, having been raised in Chile (Carlos Gigoux) and England and the US (Colin Samson), our academic perspectives are obviously products of the societies where we grew up.

The perspectives we bring to this book have not emerged from being born, raised and socialized within an indigenous society. We therefore make no attempt to speak for anyone other than ourselves, but write as two people who have found inspiration in indigenous peoples’ refreshing views of the world, knowledge, creativity, active resistance to colonialism, and their more considerate and invigorating connections to the natural environment. Although constantly under threat, many indigenous societies have developed ways of being and seeing that are not bound by the competitive individualism, sterile materialism and plunder under which our own society labours. Therefore, we write as friends and scholars trying to understand and resist.