INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

In the year 2000 the United Nations established a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues as a subsidiary organ of the Economic and Social Council. Much deliberation preceded this initiative, not least because precise demarcation of the world's indigenous populations has been elusive. In the early twenty-first century there is no single and unambiguous definition of indigenous peoples; even indigenous groups may disagree about their composition. Attempts at definition tend to follow three guiding principles.

Indigenous peoples include descendants of the original inhabitants of a country

Who have become encapsulated in their lands by a numerically and politically dominant invasive society
Who retain a cultural difference from that society
Who self-identify as indigenous

In describing the demographic features of indigenous peoples, the third criterion is crucial. For these peoples to exist at all in a statistical sense requires both administrative mechanisms to ascribe and record indigenous status and a willingness–or insistence–on the part of indigenous people to be counted as such rather than as a minority population with some distinctive characteristics (such as language, religion, or ethnicity) that differentiates it within a broader society. The degree to which these prerequisites combine to enable the compilation of demographic data varies greatly both historically and between nations. The statistical basis for a consistent global description of indigenous demography is thus tenuous at best.

Population Size

Although estimates of population size are available for most indigenous groups, the availability and quality of data on births and deaths is more sporadic. The most complete census and administrative data sources are available in North America and Australasia. With varying degrees of coverage and changing interpretations of race and ethnicity, indigenous people have been recorded in national censuses since 1870 and 1871 in the United States and Canada, since 1881 in New Zealand, and since 1901 in Australia.

In Latin America, most countries have indigenous inhabitants, but only half have a census and/or household survey program that includes information about the indigenous population. The situation in northern Europe and Russia is equally mixed: The formal acquisition of demographic data about the indigenous Saami of northern Scandinavia is still under development, but decades of Soviet administration among minority indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation has yielded basic demographic information since 1926. For countries in Africa and Asia, demographic data are also intermittent. Socalled ethnic minorities have been identified in the Chinese census since 1953, and postwar censuses in India have identified separate "Scheduled Tribes" populations. Japan has arguably the longest time series data in Asia, with regular counts of the Ainu since the early nineteenth century.

Many national governments and statistical agencies deny the existence of indigenous peoples within their borders, partly because it is difficult to establish antecedence and partly because of unresolved political tensions in defining the social basis of the nation-state. Accordingly, demographic knowledge of the indigenous San peoples of southern Africa and similar populations elsewhere emerges only from dedicated field studies.

Estimates of the number of indigenous people worldwide toward the end of the twentieth century converged on the 300 million mark, or approximately 5 percent of the world population. This number is distributed across almost half the world's countries and can be further disaggregated into some 5,300 distinct political/legal/cultural groupings described variously as "tribal," "Fourth World," or "first" nations.

Most indigenous peoples (207 million) live in Asia–overwhelmingly in China (108 million) and India (68 million)–with an estimated 50 million in Africa and 40 million in Latin America. The New World countries of Australasia and North America, which have yielded the most comprehensive and accurate data on indigenous populations, account for only a small estimated share of the global total–4.4 million, or 1.5 per cent, in 2000. Within this total the estimated size of the indigenous population in the United States (American Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut) was 2.4 million.

Indigenous Demographic Transition

The shared characteristics that define indigenous peoples are manifest in "enclave demographies" that are clearly distinct from mainstream or national demographic profiles. These characteristics derive from common historical experiences of severe population decline as a consequence of colonization by nonindigenes, followed by a period of stabilization and in some cases recuperation. In Australasia and North America rapid growth in recent decades has coincided with a shift from exclusion to inclusion of indigenous peoples in the provisions of modern states. In broad terms these phases describe an "indigenous" demographic transition along the lines of the classical model, although a significant revision is represented by the recognition of an initial, or pretransition, phase of depopulation during the period of first contact with nonindigenes. At the beginning of the twenty-first century indigenous populations could be found in each of the phases of transition. The prospect of an indigenous mobility transition has also been studied.

Consideration of the size of indigenous populations before their encapsulation by invading groups requires a temporal cutoff point. One convenient device is to distinguish populations colonized in relatively recent times after contact with European and other intercontinental migrants from those which have been subjugated for millennia by intracontinental migrations. For the former group such a "precontact" population has been estimated at 17 million for North America, lowland South America, and Oceania in the mid-eighteenth century.

By the early twentieth century the main impact of nonindigenous settlement in those regions had been to reduce autochthonous numbers to barely 1.3 million. Casting the net wider to incorporate Russia, southern Asia, island southeast Asia, and central and southern Africa, the decline in the population of indigenous peoples could have amounted to as much as 50 million between 1780 and 1930. The causes of this population loss are well understood and include disease, frontier violence, and the loss of land by what were predominantly hunter-gatherer populations.

Demographic Transition in Australia and Canada

The existence of relatively robust time-series data for indigenous populations in Australia and Canada since the mid-nineteenth century provides an opportunity to explore the course of indigenous demographic transition. Similar overviews are available for the Maori of Aotearoa in New Zealand and for Native Americans. It is clear that indigenous populations in these New World countries have undergone a series of systematic fluctuations in fertility and mortality levels that have been uneven over space and time but ultimately comprehensive and uniform in effect. These fluctuations have been conceived of as separate but overlapping transitions from the pre-European contact period of stable growth with high mortality and fertility through a phase of postcontact population decline to a stationary state, followed by a period of high growth and finally a regime of lower natural growth based on reduced mortality and fertility.

In light of the evidence for human habitation in present-day Australia and Canada for tens of thousands of years, it is reasonable to assume that the indigenous population levels first encountered by European settlers were the product of a long-term balance between birth rates and death rates. Most analysts suggest that this stationary state was due to sustained high birth rates and death rates.

In Australia controversy surrounds the exact estimation of population size at the time of the first sustained contact with Europeans in 1788, with 300,000 as the likely minimum figure and 1 million as an upper bound. In either case a drastic decline in numbers accompanied the process of European occupation as a result of reduced fertility and rising mortality. This decline was rapid until about 1890, after which the population was probably stationary until the 1930s at roughly 20 percent of its original estimated minimum size. In Canada the precontact Indian population has been estimated at a roughly similar size (250,000). This was reduced to around 120,000 by 1900 as a consequence of introduced diseases and hostilities between native populations and invading settlers (Norris 1990).

In both Australia and Canada the first sign of further transition appeared with a rise in the birth rate to over 40 per 1,000 in the post—World War II years, falling back to around 35 per 1,000 by the 1970s and 1980s. This was accompanied in the 1960s and 1970s by a sudden and substantial drop in the death rate, which leveled off at 16 per 1,000 among indigenous Australians and 10 per 1,000 among Canadian Indians. In each case this heralded a period of rapid population increase with annual growth rates of up to 2.5 percent by the 1970s.

The current phase of transition is to a regime of lower natural increase based on reductions in both fertility and mortality. By 2000 the rate of natural increase among indigenous Australians and Canadians had fallen to 2 percent per year, although this was still four times the level of their respective national rates.

Trends in Mortality

The crude death rate for indigenous people in Australia remained high until the mid-1960s but declined sharply between 1965 and 1978, falling from 19 to 13 per 1,000. The primary cause was a precipitous reduction in the infant mortality rate (IMR) from around 100 per 1,000 births in the mid-1960s to 26 by 1981. This was a direct consequence of greatly enhanced access to the health infrastructure, especially community-based prenatal and hospital-based postnatal care. Further improvement in infant survival since the 1980s has been less impressive, with indigenous IMRs remaining around three times the Australian average. A similar decline was recorded over the same period in Canada, with the indigenous IMR falling from 42 to 15 between 1971 and 1981.

Improvement in life expectancy has been far less dramatic. In Australia the first reliable national estimates in 1981 revealed life expectancies for indigenous people of around 56 years for males and 64 years for females, some 20 years below those of the general population. This situation had not altered by 2000. In Canada the equivalent gap in life expectancy in the 1990s was eight years despite a steady improvement in indigenous mortality since the 1950s. In both countries the overall level of indigenous mortality reflects persistently higher indigenous death rates at all ages but especially in middle adulthood between 30 and 50 years of age. This lack of improvement relative to the life expectancy of the general population despite lowered infant mortality is a unique demographic phenomenon and reflects the influence of lifestyle factors as a primary cause of death among marginalized populations.

Trends in Fertility

Total fertility rates (TFRs) among indigenous women in Australia peaked in the decade 1956–1966, remained high until 1971, and then fell sharply throughout the 1970s, effectively halving the TFR from around 5.9 in the period 1966–1971 to around 3.3 in the period 1976–1981. Results from the 1996 census indicated further lowering of the TFR to 2.7, representing a drop of around 50 percent since 1971. The overall expectation is for steady progress toward replacement fertility in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

In explaining this decline in Australia, the focus has been on the effect of increased participation by indigenous people, particularly women, in mainstream institutional structures, which has altered the costs and benefits of having children. Three factors–age at leaving school, labor force status, and income–are regarded as particularly instrumental. In Canada fertility has also been lowered by delayed marriage and childbirth.

Nondemographic Factors in Population Growth

Despite reduced natural growth, recent census counts of indigenous populations in Australia and Canada reveal an apparent population explosion. Between 1971 and 1996 the census count of the indigenous Australian population increased by 200 percent, substantially above the underlying rate of natural increase. A similar discrepancy was observed in Canada. This "error of closure" reflects the contributions of a greater propensity of individuals to self-identify as indigenous, an expanded potential pool of a self-identified population as a result of outmarriage, and legislative change, notably the reinstatement and registration provisions of the 1985 Indian Act (Bill C-31) in Canada, which relaxed the rules governing entitlement to Indian status.

The current high indigenous population growth rates reflect the interplay of political, administrative, and cultural processes. In the past these processes effectively excluded or devalued indigenous representation in official statistics. In the contemporary period efforts increasingly are being made to encourage and facilitate self-identification. This means that populations that are portrayed as discrete and homogeneous for statistical and administrative purposes are in reality becoming less discrete, less homogeneous, and more difficult to quantify unambiguously. Despite this process, demographic divergence from national profiles remains a hallmark of indigenous populations.

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