Indigenous People, Mission Statement 

Founded in March 1997, Indigenous People is a non-profit cultural education organisation based in Camberwell, South London that works with indigenous music and dance groups from Africa and elsewhere to raise awareness of their spiritual and cultural wealth of their communities and to enable them to harness the economic potential of their culture to promote social and economic regeneration at home. 

Participatory Arts Education and Social Inclusion

Indigenous People specialises in organising participatory arts projects, whereby the groups visit schools and community centres in communities prior to a performance, teaching children a few rhythms, dances and chants which they can then use to join with the group at the final performance in a communal finale, demonstrating what they have learned. Engendering social cohesion through common values, beliefs and traditions, it is the vital importance of local culture as the basis of local community that Indigenous People seek to emphasise. Their educational work therefore aims to encourage people, particularly the young, to take a more active role in the production of local art and culture, rather than remaining passive consumers of what is fed to them by the mass media. This helps to instil in them a sense of meaning, purpose and belonging in their lives, the lack of which often manifests itself in profoundly anti-social ways. Through their efforts to engender a greater sense of cultural security in young people they thereby hope to offset the negative effects of discrimination, a product of cultural insecurity.  Furthermore, by advocating the principles of cultural diversity and the tolerance and celebration of cultural difference, the charity lends its support to the trend towards a more multi-cultural society in which diversity rather than uniformity is valued and sustained.

Cultural Competence

Cultural competence refers to a young person having knowledge of and comfort with people of different cultural/racial/ethnic backgrounds.  Cultural knowledge, cultural awareness, and cultural sensitivity all convey the idea of improving cross-cultural capacity, as illustrated in the following definitions:

Attempting to enter different cultural systems of thought can only promote understanding. This has particular significance for those who are consciously engaged in education. They have to be sensitive to different senses of self and to amend the direction and delivery of their work accordingly. It places a primary duty on the educator to listen and act in such a way as to remain true to people’s developing sense of themselves and to guard against the imposition of models of thinking, which are of the educator’s making or ownership.

So as to foster a greater degree of awareness and understanding of other cultures, Indigenous People develops cultural exchange projects and builds bridges between different cultures.  Broadening horizons and accessing alternative perspectives allows us to appreciate the diversity of solutions to the social challenges and problems facing humanity. In particular, the organisation aims to demonstrate that human fulfilment and well-being can be defined in many ways, leading us away from a preoccupation solely with material consumption towards a better understanding of the meaning and quality of life.

Social Justice

While many indigenous communities suffer considerable economic and social exclusion, displacement from their ancestral lands and a gradual erosion of their culture, they embody a wealth of spiritual and environmental knowledge that is gaining increasing recognition in the post-industrial West. The organisation therefore seeks to empower indigenous communities to harness the economic potential of their culture so as to promote indigenous led economic, social and cultural development. This contrasts with a situation in which due to a lack of capital or management / administrative capacity, they are hostage to non-indigenous middle-men who extract the bulk of the value for themselves without regard to the interests of the community of origin. Indigenous People therefore support efforts to protect and enforce the intellectual property rights of indigenous communities in the face of growing bio-technological and artistic piracy of indigenous knowledge.

Cultural Self-Esteem and Bio-Cultural Diversity

Many indigenous communities are suffering a gradual loss of identity and culture due to the effects of westernisation or, in more extreme cases, genocide. Knowledge and belief systems that are millennia old are being lost as elders die without passing on knowledge to the next generation. Indigenous People seek to support the preservation and revitalisation of indigenous cultures as part of the Earths’s Biocultural Diversity (BCD) - the total variety exhibited by the world’s natural and cultural systems. It may be thought of as the sum total of the world’s differences, no matter what their origin. BCD includes biological diversity at all its levels, from genes to populations to species to ecosystems; cultural diversity in all its manifestations (including linguistic diversity), ranging from individual ideas to entire cultures.

There is an increasing awareness that humans are an integral part of nature, and that we have helped shape many "natural" environments. This points to co-evolution between humans and the natural environments in which our species evolved. Therefore understanding the role of humans within the natural world and the languages and cultures that define that role is becoming increasingly important to a holistic view of diversity. But biocultural diversity is in serious jeopardy. It is apparent that many of the same socioeconomic and political factors, such as economic globalization, overexploitation of natural resources and growing worldwide sociocultural homogenization are negatively impacting on all forms of diversity. It is well known that a diversity of species lends stability and resilience to the world's natural ecosystems. A diversity of languages and cultures does the same for human ecosystems — and that natural and human ecosystems are intimately, indeed inextricably interrelated, as are the consequences of diversity loss: a monolithic global human culture is not good for biological communities.

By leveraging the high value that indigenous cultures attract in western societies, Indigenous People supports traditional cultural practitioners to earn a living from their culture, supporting themselves, their families and their communities from the proceeds of tours. In this way, younger generations are inspired and incentivized to learn from the elders, learning old songs, dances and rhythms and inventing new ones, albeit while respecting the traditional form. In this way, Indigenous People challenge the assumption that western values and development models are the only avenue towards prosperity and happiness, observing that levels of suicide and mental illness are much higher in western countries than in ‘less-developed’ societies. As western materialist values and belief systems are being increasingly questioned in the era of climate change and the energy crisis, Indigenous People seek to highlight the extent to which we in the West can learn from indigenous cultures in seeking a more balanced relationship with our environment and are more healthy and happy existence that celebrates non-material, or spiritual, forms of fulfillment, an area in which indigenous cultures are particularly rich.

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