Indigenous

The definition ties the word to Marsh's periodization rather than to priority of arrival or to colonial history. What makes customs or people indigenous is that the community follows a first or second age culture of the region in question, meaning one of the great variety of autonomous and complete societies of the first age, or one of the hierarchical trade empires of the second. The phrase covers customs as well as hereditary members, so a practice can be indigenous without a particular person being so. Defining it by culture and age rather than by ancestry has one notable consequence, which is that the word describes what a community follows rather than what happened to it, so it does not require a coloniser to give it meaning. The framework's interest in these cultures is not preservationist. Animism, gynotheism and shamanism are the root first age beliefs, and Marsh treats animist knowledge as containing something the later arrangements discarded, particularly the treatment of life as a force flowing in and out of objects, which she says agrees with every culture outside the one recent materialist ideology that called itself science. Her charge against that exclusion is direct. Science was created in opposition to animism, largely because categorization was the method by which the wealthy and urban differentiated themselves, and scientific superstition produces an aversion to knowledge emanating from the wrong sources, leaving gaping and inexplicable holes in what is known.

There is no single accepted definition in international law, and the United Nations has deliberately avoided adopting one, working instead from self-identification, historical continuity with pre-colonial societies, distinct social and cultural systems and non-dominance. Most working definitions therefore include a relationship to colonization. Anthropology and indigenous studies have criticized externally imposed definitions at length, and there is a substantial literature on traditional ecological knowledge and its exclusion from scientific institutions, which converges with Marsh's point. Her definition is unusual in leaving colonization out entirely, keying instead to a stage of cultural organization, which makes the category available in regions where the colonial framing does not apply and detaches it from the politics of recognition.