Glossary

Enlightenment

A European intellectual movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that emphasised reason and science, rather than tradition and religion.

Colonialism

Process of establishment of entire systems of control and exploitation of colonised communities.

Coloniality

Process of controlling and management of knowledge by universals of Western modernity and Eurocentrism.

Colonisation

Process of imperial conquest, ‘discovery’ and physical establishment of colonies in ‘new’ lands.

Great Divide

A concept used to refer to the creation of hierarchical polarities that establish divisions such as ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, or ‘Us’ and ‘Them’.

Indigenous

The term indigenous (with a lower case ‘i’) means ‘native, original inhabitant’, from the Latin indigen(a). Indigenous (with a capital ‘I’) refers to people with experiences of enduring shared colonial histories, as well as political initiatives for the recognition of collective rights.

Race

A pseudo-scientific belief, originating in the European Enlightenment, that humans can be divided into distinct groups characterised by physical and/or genetic differences that result in a group having physical, intellectual and moral advantages or disadvantages relative to other groups.

Shaman

A concept that originates from the Evenki term šaman or xaman used to describe an Evenki practitioner. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it evolved into a comparative concept often used to describe the practitioners and knowledge holders of colonised peoples. In the twentieth century, shaman became a term that some religious and spiritual practitioners worldwide began to self-identify.

Terra nullius

Latin: ‘land belonging to no one’

Wilderness

A concept similar to the term terra nullius that was used to describe colonised lands, particularly in the Arctic region, and to justify colonisation.