Indigenous people of Thailand

I received this question not long ago, and wanted to share both it and my answer on this board. Let's start a thread about Thailand's indigenous people, Hill-Tribes, Burmese, and other underrepresented populations. What are your experiences? thoughts? ideas?


QUESTION:
I've been researching thai ancient history and I'm puzzled by something. In many places I find a small passing reference to "indigenous people", with no further explanation. My teacher has also talked about indigenous people when he discusses the various roots of Thai medicine, but nowhere do I find anything broader than a one sentence reference to them mixed into some long passage that discusses the T'ai, the Mon and the Khmer. I'm wondering who these indigenous people were? What they did? Where they came from and where they went? The word "indigenous" is just so vague, and the attention to these people is so extremely small; yet it would seem that we are talking about the first to inhabit that land yes? Did they come from africa? Presumably they would have mixed with incoming peoples and their DNA and cultural habits and even medical practices would in some trace amounts be contributing to the people that live there now.


MY ANSWER:
The word “indigenous” is a tough one, since it can be used to mean many things. An “indigenous Thai practice” or the “indigenous people of Thailand” obviously is meant to stand in contrast to those ideas or people who came from abroad. The problem is the timeframe. I can think of 3 distinct uses of “indigenous”:

(1) In most cases “indigenous” means T’ai, and is directly opposed to Indian, Chinese, European, or other “newcomers.”

(2) Of course, as we know, the T‘ai themselves came from abroad as well. So, in some cases, the word “indigenous” could mean those Mon and Khmer people that were there before the T’ais.

(3) Further complicating the picture... as it turns out, if you look back far enough in history, you see that all of the above-mentioned people—Mon, Khmer, T’ai, etc.—all came from outside Southeast Asia. These groups belong to a larger group called the Austronesians or Malayo-Polynesians (that originate from Taiwan if I remember correctly) and today stretch from Madagascar to Oceania. When they spread throughout Asia, these people displaced and absorbed even earlier groups of people that inhabited these lands. If these are the “indigenous” people you mean, they are long gone, and we have little to no trace of their culture. There are a few pockets, such as the Orang Asli in Malaysia and several tribes in Papua New Guinea, that may be vestiges of these groups.

If you’re interested in this last paragraph, take a look at Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” which deals with the Austronesian expansion in some detail. I don’t have the book here, so don’t incorporate what I’ve written above into your teaching materials without double-checking the dates, names, etc.

Hope this helps rather than further complicating!