1) From this week (November 12th, 2021): On Indigenous Perspectives at the COP26 Climate Change Conference- written by Mary Annette Pember, citizen of Red Cliff Ojibwe tribe. Worth reading if you want a summarized update of some important points which were brought up at this year’s event.
https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/indigenous-voices-debates-from-cop26-climate-meeting
2) An article from 1997, on the concept of “indigeneity in post-Colonial China,” floating around on my Facebook feed, I forget who reposted it. I’d bookmarked it because it’s a bit too long and dense to digest in one sitting, but in glancing over it a few times, I saw a couple of thought-provoking points which I felt could be investigated further… I’ll drop a few quotes here below, ones which caught my attention and I’ve been ruminating over it since. However, this all continues to circle back to my age-old problem, of how I have such few individuals I can talk to about these things, as most people just don’t care enough to try to understand, so I flip-flop between feeling frustrated or apathetic, giving up, and dissociating from caring as much as I used to… Anyways, Idk if this needs to be still needs to be said, but, I’m open to feedback on this, so contact me if you care enough to have a conversation.
“China's indigenous peoples are generally referred to as "minority nationalities" given their official status in the Chinese administrative structure. This rubric does them a disservice, obscuring not only their own indigenous identities, but also the nature of multiculturalism and multiethnicity in China. It also fails to recognize the dramatic revitalization of ethnic culture taking place in China today, both among the "minorities" living along the country's borders, and within the many peoples comprising the so-called Han majority.
…One of the difficult issues facing minority peoples of China is the official position that the Han majority is also an indigenous people with roots in the Wei River valley. Discussion about China's minority nationalities often fails to make this important point about government policy regarding Han indigeneity. The notion of a Han person or Han ren dates back centuries and refers to descendants of the Han dynasty that flourished around the same time as the Roman Empire. The concept of Han nationality or Han minzu, however, is an entirely modern phenomenon that arose with the shift from the Chinese empire to the modern nation-state. Prasenjit Duara recently noted that since the early part of this century, Chinese reformers have been concerned that the Chinese people lacked a sense of nationhood, unlike Westerners and China's minority groups. Chinese reformers believe that Chinese unity stopped at the clan or community level rather than extending to the nation as a whole. Sun Yat-Sen, leader of the republican movement that toppled the last imperial dynasty of China (the Qing) in 1911, popularized the idea that there were 'Five Peoples of China’-the Han, Manchus, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Hui (a term that included all Muslims in China).”