Concept: Native

Definition: (noun) a person born in a specified place or associated with a place by birth, whether subsequently resident there or not.

Related Terms:  indigeneity, aboriginal, first peoples, native rights, digital native

Description: The term native has changed in usage from denoting inferiority during the period of colonialism and conquest (as in natives as savages in need of civilizing influences) to native as indigenous, with rights to their land, language, and culture. However, in many societies such as India, the Philippines and Mexico that have large tribal or pre-literate populations, the earlier feelings about “natives” still hold. In the late 20th century, among postcolonial scholars, the term vernacular was advanced as a way to describe alternative modernities, local languages and cultures, and the strength of the historically marginalized. 

Native is also an oppositional term in relation to the non-native or migrant. By virtue of common history or ancestry, natives may have feelings of superiority and cultural insiderism as compared to recent arrivals. The history of immigration in the U.S., till recently generally hospitable to (legal) immigrants, is also a history of periods of nativism that result in violence against those minorities who are seen as taking away jobs, benefits, or a particular “way of life” (Japanese during world war 2 and the 1980s; Koreans in the 1990s; Chinese in the 2020s). In her book, Woman, Native, Other (1989), author Trinh T. Minh-ha uses each of these words as sites of critique to dispel dominant meanings of cultural superiority and inferiority. Noting six stages of the term “development” since late antiquity,  she mentions the successive forms of the barbarian, the pagan, the infidel, the wild man, the native, and the underdeveloped. Minh-ha seeks to create new ways of describing the world, and particularly the place of women of color within it.

More recently, native or indigenous voices provide insights into their own experiences with media for community building, documentation, and reflection. The edited volume, Photography’s Other Histories (2003) includes some of these marginalized perspectives: in Australia, Jo Anne Driessens discovery of her Aboriginal family through historical photographs, and Michael Aird’s analysis of studio portraits of the 1930s in Queensland, Australia tells stories about scientific experiments done on Aboriginals that are documented, but also photos that show the social relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Other essays locate photography of Natives such as the Navajo in the U.S. within the violent tactics of erasure during the 19th century, as well as photographic practices involving the indigenous in Kenya, Peru, and Papua New Guinea. 

S.C. 2024

 

Further Readings/Viewings:

Killers of the Flower Moon, 2023 (dir. Martin Scorsese)

Aranyer Din Ratri/Days and Nights in the Forest, 1970 (dir. Satyajit Ray)

Roy, Arundhati. “Gandhi, but with Guns,” parts 1-6. The Guardian, March 2010. 

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