On Being Indigenous: An Essay on the Hermeneutics of ‘Cultural Identity'

The range of cultural resources distributed along developmental pathways open to young persons as they frame the outlines of their own identities is not fixed, but inevitably varies across historical moments. The young lives most touched by such transitional circumstances arguably belong to those that find themselves growing up in times of dramatic cultural change - the lives, for example, of refugee and immigrant children, and especially of those indigenous youth still riding out the successive waves of earlier postcolonial storms. This essay is about forming an identity in such troubled times, and about how individual parents and whole rearing communities might choose to selectively intervene. The thesis of this paper is that the material contents of cultures in transition ordinarily have shorter ‘shelf lives' and earlier ‘best before' dates than do those processes and practices at work in the procedural background. Consequently, it is argued that a parent's or a community's best hopes for success in aiding young people in their identity struggles lie along instructional pathways that feature the signature tools and processes, rather than the material contents, of cultures in radical transition.