Their use of the term indigenous as a homogenous term to describe people across the globe is an act of settler colonialism—The label was imposed by the settler to tie colonized peoples to a spatial location as an act of colonization—Use of the term as a generic label is racist colonialism

There has been opposition by various tribal groups and ‘first nations’ peoples to the terms ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Aborigine’ (and its cognates), although governments around the world continue to use both terms. Increasingly, the favoured term is ‘First Nations’ although this term is increasingly used in legal discourse especially in Canada to refer to members of legally recognized reserve communities. Accordingly, some scholars argue that the collective nouns used to name the world’s tribal groups have become increasing problematic and that at source the terms have often been derogatory, historically inaccurate and contaminated by a colonial past based on the demeaning notion of ‘primitive’ peoples with its assumption of western cognitive superiority. One example—the collective noun ‘Maori’—was introduced, according to Rangihau (1992), to destroy the heterogeneity of the indigenous tribes of New Zealand. Most indigenous peoples prefer to be named or referred to by their specific nation or tribe names which themselves are sometimes contentious. It has been noted that the term ‘indigenous’ (or ‘aborigine’) is not itself indigenous. The word ‘tribe’ itself has a troubled history. Béteille (1998) notes that even after the intensive ethnographic fieldwork embarked on during the decades up to the 1950s anthropologists never questioned that what they were studying was ‘tribes’ but finding a suitable definition that covered all cases proved difficult. Finding a definition that transcended the old ideological uses of the term it had inherited from its nineteenth century colonial disciplinary meanings where the concept tribe represented a particular type of society and a stage of evolution proved even more difficult. In the human sciences, as the French philosopher Foucault (1980) demonstrates so convincingly, even the most basic terminology is a discursive construction of ‘knowledge/power.’ The common currency of all of these terms—Aborigine, Indian, Indigenous, or First Nations—their uses and valency in government, legal and scholarly contexts, are often offensive to tribal groups especially when used in an international, totalizing and universal way to define radically different groups because they have the effect of homogenizing peoples in ways that early imperial anthropology created ‘others’ as ‘indigenous’ in differentiation and opposition to colonial settlers, often using these labels for legal, educational, adminstrative and policing purposes. The term ‘indigenous’ derives from the late Latin ‘indigenus’ and ‘indigena’ (native) and from the Old Latin ‘indu’ that is derived from the archaic ‘endo’ (a cognate of the Greek ‘endo’), meaning ‘in, within’ and the Latin ‘gignere’ meaning ‘to beget’, from the root ‘gene’ meaning ‘to produce, give birth, beget.’ ‘Indigena’ in Latin means ‘native’ used of plants, animals, peoples who come from a particular region. Its first known use was in 1640s when it was applied to plants and cultures in the New World. The general sense of the term applied to that produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment; also sometimes used as a synonym for ‘native,’ ‘innate,’ ‘aborigine,’ ‘endemic,’ and ‘inborn.’ There is a strong sense of replication to the term, with the evolution of the indigenous group being self-derived. In indigenous perception, there could quite likely be a fit here between the linguistic label for the group—who, according to the term, have a tendency to rampantly self-populate—and the genocidal tools historically used to stop them from self-populating, or more current attempts to understand them through collecting their genetic material (see for instance Gardiner (1999)). Moreover, their tie through the term to the natural world sits well with a racist belief that these populations are more basic, unreliable and generally barbaric. The word ‘indigenous’ was first used officially by the United Nations in 2002 in its political declaration of the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Prior to this time, the term was regarded as ‘still under debate’ for use in UN official documents. Béteille (1998, pp. 190, 191) suggests that in the US, the idea of indigenous people has acquired a certain moral charge, partly because of the awakening of old memories of usurpation, spoliation, and exploitation but also because many contemporary anthropologists seem to enjoy being in a state of moral excitation. Yet Béteille’s comment only emphasizes ‘meaning as use’ and the significance of political, legal and social contexts in shaping acceptable usage of terms that are contentious because of a tainted past. It shows also the need for constant philosophical and linguistic scrutiny for terminology recognizing that language is both dynamic and infinitely revisable.