The article on the webpage http://www.nupedia.com/article/short/New+Zealand/,
for example, refers to "the indigenous Maori culture" of New Zealand. "What's
wrong with that ?" I hear you exclaim, in tones varying from surprise to moral
outrage.
It is a conventional academic and popular stupidity to refer to anyone living
in a given stretch of land before the arrival of Europeans as "indigenous"
or "native". The Maoris did not constitute a political or cultural unity before
the arrival of Europeans, and they probably arrived at different times from
different Pacific islands, which were themselves politically and culturally
distinct. So there was no Maori entity there which could be called "indigenous",
and God only knows which of the component tribal entities was the first on
the scene, or if indeed they wiped out the real "indigenous" people who may
have preceded them.
The editor referred me to the author of the article, who is not a historian
or geographer, as you might expect, but a computer scientist !
He agreed with me that the term "indigenous" is an odd concept, but he wanted
to be consistent with the normal usage of the term and to be uncontroversial.
In other words, academics such as he prefer to write conventionally stupid
things than to be intelligent but unconventional !
Most people living in most parts of the world live there as the result of
conquest, which means that their title to the land -- both before and after
the era of European colonisation -- is based on conquest (though they may
dress it up as "settlement"). However, the lying and, indeed, brain-dead
academic use of the term "indigenous" in such cases heightens the specious
moral outrage of the so-called "indigenous" people and causes oppression,
such as the creeping genocide which is now being carried out on White farmers
in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
The point is not that colonialism is justifiable -- the point is that the
people who were colonised had themselves previously colonised other peoples,
though they may not have used sailing boats to do so. To
pretend that only people who travel by sailing-boat are colonialists is to
commit "Transportism" -- discrimination on the basis of mode of
transport.