Autochtony

The Global Journals Portal contains 150 publications edited by indigenous peoples around the world, aimed at preserving, defending or building their political autonomy and their cultural and linguistic identities in the face of projects of colonization, state extension and national homogenization. These populations have often been subjected to extractivist systems involving the confiscation of their territories, as well as their forced contribution to coercive production models; they were also victims of genocide. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, along with the generalization of the administrative models of the nation-state, these groups sought to acquire legal statuses enabling them to preserve their own cultural heritage and to constitute themselves as distinct groups of citizens. In contexts of tension and symbolic or material violence, these populations thus opposed assimilation and integration without renouncing their fundamental rights to life, to land and to self-determination.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in its Human Rights Fact Sheet No. 9, defines indigenous or aboriginal peoples as “the descendants of those who lived in a country or geographic region at the time when population groups of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived there and subsequently became predominant, through conquest, occupation, colonization or other means (... ) These peoples and most other indigenous peoples have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics which are clearly different from those of the other groups that make up the national populations.”