Indigenous peoples in Asia: a long history

Abstract

Seventy per cent of the world’s 250 million Indigenous people live in Asia, most often in highlands and other regions remote from the fertile agricultural plains that formed the heartland of the continent’s great civilisations. They have shared with the first peoples in North America and Australasia the historical experience of slaughter, dispossession, epidemic disease, and socio-economic disruption and marginalisation as a consequence of settler intrusion into their lands. The violent encounter between Asian first peoples and Asian settler societies, however, has often been overshadowed by the history of cultural, economic, and political contact that has blurred the distinction between the two groups. The incorporation of Asian first peoples into larger polities was a much older and longer process, marked by extended periods of prior contact during which first peoples themselves selectively adopted technology and culture from what were to become settler metropoles. First peoples and settlers, moreover, were subject to both Western colonialism and imperialism in Asia.