Indigenous Land, Indigenous People: Distinction, Belonging, and Identities in Portuguese Timor

Land regimes bind together identity, practices, and access. In Portuguese Timor, notions of distinction and belonging have reflected changing relationships to land. This article examines four key movements where changing forces reconfigured ideas of indigeneity as expressed through land governance, law, policy, and ideological frameworks. The first, in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, was a dominant community of Southeast Asians and others who embraced Portuguese identity even before colonial governance on Timor. Second, from the late 1800s through 1910s, the colonial government intervened in indigenous agriculture by production regulations, land redistribution, and legal classifications of native land. The third, from the 1930 Colonial Act through the 1960s, further institutionalized Indigenous status while offering native subjects pathways to formally transcend this categorization through assimilation. The fourth involved new Timorese conceptualizations of national identities, with reference to agrarian life and the land as symbolic of their self-determination.