Capitalization of "indigenous" [closed]
Does the word "indigenous" need to be capitalized in academic writing?
For example, mid-sentence, is it:
...Indigenous methodologies or indigenous methodologies
...Indigenous knowledge or indigenous knowledge
...Indigenous narratives or indigenous narratives
In a sentence:
This study sets out to explore the indigenous narratives of rural women as a type of indigenous methodology to obtain indigenous knowledge and gain local perspectives on...
There are two different usages.
Compare English:
The well-known noun usage and the associated adjective are always capitalised. But there exists another usage:
english [also capitalised]: a. The spin given to a propelled ball by striking it on one side or releasing it with a sharp twist.
[AHD; reformatted.
This may be treated as a common noun.
More analogously (thanks to jsw29 for this suggestion), the Labour Party / Labour, a main political party in the UK, whose name came via 'the Labour Representation Committee', has obviously appropriated the word 'labour'. The common noun remains uncapitalised, while all references to the party are capitalised. There are other such examples.
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And 'indigenous' has two main senses:
indigenous [adj]
- Originating, growing, or produced in a certain place or region. See Synonyms at native.
- a. Being a member of the original inhabitants of a particular place.
b. Of, belonging to, or characteristic of such inhabitants.
[AHD]
The first, prototypical sense should only be capitalised where other factors mandate this:
- This plant is indigenous to the peninsula.
But when the second sense (/subsenses), referring to human groupings, is/are in play, there is often a precising definition in use, a conversion of a general descriptor to a defining name. Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. recommends:
Always capitalize Indigenous, Aboriginal, First Nation, Inuit, Métis as a sign of respect the same way that English, French and Spanish etc are capitalized.
On occasion, it may be difficult to know on reading (without context) whether the people group is being referred to, or the place of origin, by I/indigenous. The author of course can indicate (mid-sentence) by choosing I or i.
In the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), among academic sources there are nine appearances of indigenous narratives, none at the beginning of the sentence. All but one are capitalized, e.g.
… but they have also critiqued the way it silences Indigenous narratives.
… found in the middle of the last chapter of his very first book on Indigenous narratives, Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagle's Lodgefire (1915).
There are two appearances of indigenous methodologies, both capitalized. There are 287 appearances of indigenous knowledge. It's harder to do a count in that case, but it is safe to say that many are capitalized—I would say well over half, at least.
So, yes; it is common to capitalize indigenous in such constructions, at least in American academic writing.
Note, however, that the tendency goes the other way in some other constructions. For example indigenous population appears to be rarely capitalized.
I checked the British National Corpus (BNC) as well, but among the academic sources, there were no hits at all for the three constructions you mention.