The INDIGEO project
The INDIGEO database has been compiled in the scope of the research project of the same name, funded from 2016 to 2021 by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche’s Accueil de Chercheurs de Haut Niveau (ACHN - Junior) programme. The acronym INDIGEO comes from the expression Indigenous Geographies, as mentioned in the title of the project: “Indigenous Geographies: roots, developments, and perspectives in the francophone universe” (ANR-16-ACHN-0025), co-ordinated by Bastien Sepúlveda in the Territoires, Villes, Environnement & Société (TVES) research team at the Université de Lille.
The INDIGEO project is founded on the observation that the increase in indigenous territorial claims in various regions and on the international stage began stirring ever-increasing interest among the scientific community from the 1970s onward, especially among geographers. However, due to the simultaneous inclusion of the output on this subject in different major fields of geography as well as in other related disciplines, Indigenous Geographies were for a long time ignored as a specific area of thought.
Furthermore, based on the premise that training in this field still relies on output that varies vastly between world regions according to trends, sensibilities, and streams of thought specific to each academic context, it became imperative to be able to accurately locate the origins and developments of Indigenous Geographies. In brief, to trace back their genealogy as well as systematizing and retrospectively promoting the potential input as a specific field of research.
The INDIGEO project revolved around three main, complementary tasks:
- The first task, “Genealogy of Indigenous Geographies”, strove to compile a retrospective global round-up of the interest taken in socio-spatial indigenous realities in various world regions. It is in this very precise framework that the INDIGEO database was compiled.
- The second task, “Indigenous Geographies in the francophone world”, consisted in identifying and analysing the contribution of francophone geography to the history and development of Indigenous Geographies. This Task thus partly overlapped the first one, with which it shares an epistemological interest.
- The third and last task, “The indigenous territorial issue in France”, set out to stir interest for the indigenous territorial question in overseas France through surveys conducted in French Guiana and New Caledonia about the territorial issues encountered by Amerindian and Kanak populations.