Indigenous tourism and the challenge of sustainability

During the past two decades, there has been a growing interest in indigenous tourism. By utilising Ryan’s (2005) considerations on the issues in increasing the focus on indigenous tourism research, the main reasons for the touristic interests are related to the changes in the tourism industry and indigenous societies themselves. Although cultural elements and differences have attracted tourists for a relatively long time, the recent changes in themodes of tourism production and consumption have created growing markets for new and varyingforms of cultural tourism activities, such as indigenous tourism. These changes in tourism are largely based on wider movements in Western production systems and related consumption modes from Fordism towards post-Fordism (Urry 1990), or from a mass scale to more individualised patterns of production and consumption. This has created growing and new kinds of demandsfor tourism, involving possibilities for a wide range of activities, attractions and cultural learning opportunities (Poon 1993; McIntosh 2004), for example, including the emergence of indigenous tourism. While tourism has grown and transformed, the indigenous communities and their socio- economic environments have also changed - or they are dramatically changing. Inmany places, traditional livelihoods have lost their ability to provide economic survival and well-being for the people, or their future viability is seen as being challenged by the people. In addition, the general modernisation of the surrounding societies of indigenous people has created both external and internal pressures for communities to be involved with ongoing socioeconomic development processes and their outcomes. At the same time, the indigenouspeople have become more aware and also critically concerned about their role and position insocieties and development, including tourism. In addition, international and national agreements on indigenous rights have supported their position (see Sinclair 2003; Greene 2004). Thus, on the one hand, the increasing tourism demand has provided possibilities for the development of tourism based on the attractiveness of indigenous communities and cultures. On the other hand, the agreements and evolved indigenous people’s need to be actively involved in, benefit from and also control the ways in which tourism is operating and managed in their everyday environment has supported the development of indigenous tourism, i.e. a tourism activity in which ‘indigenous people are directly involved, either through control and/or by having their culture serve as the essence of the attraction’ (Hinch and Butler 1996: 9). Although there are many ongoing processes, elements and aims that support the symbiotic relationship between tourism and indigenous communities, the co-existence is not always harmonic, but is characterised by conflicts, costs and uneven power relations. Indeed, for indigenous people, the tourism industry may represent a competing resource user, outsideinterests and a non-local development that does not ‘derive from processes internal to those societies’ (Urry 1990: 64). Therefore, many scholars have emphasised the needfor sustainable and community-based tourism development in the context of indigenous people (see Hinch and Butler 2007). This chapter aims to discuss the nature of indigenous tourism and the relationship between tourism development and indigenous people. First, the idea of indigenous people is critically discussed, followed by the discussion of indigenous tourism, its definitions and limits to growth in tourism development.