Promoting Indigenous Tourism
Indigenous tourism needs to abide by certain guidelines.
With all the different types of tourism, sometimes it’s hard to sift through and find the ones that are truly worth the effort. Poorism? Not so much a fan, thanks. Staycation? Uh, no.
But here’s one that absosmurfly should be on your radar screen if you’re interested in socially conscious tourism, ecotourism, or sustainable tourism: Indigenous Tourism.
Indigenous tourism experiences, products, and destinations are those that are owned and operated by indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles. Back in 2005, at the International Institute for Peace through Tourism’s 3rd Global Summit on Peace through Tourism in Thailand, the Indigenous Tourism Forum participants developed a list of guiding principles for how indigenous tourism be conducted:
- Tourism must provide economic, social, cultural and environmental benefits for host communities while having minimal impacts on these sustainability factors.
- Poverty alleviation must be a primary goal of Indigenous tourism development.
- Tourism development must be community approved and controlled.
- Tourism must be co-managed by government and host communities.
- There must be true and demonstrated respect and recognition of Indigenous cultures by the tourism industry.
- Development of Indigenous tourism must be participatory, with appropriate roles played by government, NGOs and community based organizations, host communities and the tourism industry.
- Tourism needs to be complementary to the local and Indigenous economy.
It’s not clear if these guiding principles have been widely distributed and accepted in the tourism or international development fields. The Forum also put together some recommendations on how to plan, implement, and maintain an indigenous tourism effort in a manner that is culturally respectful, including the following topic areas: community determination, empowering communities, defining community, community ownership, private public partnerships, tourism frameworks, and skill development, among others.
But what about the tourists? As laypeople, it’s difficult for us to find valid indigenous tourism opportunities, ensuring they are what they say they are instead of some sort of Disneyesque version of what we think local culture may be. See this Washington Post article for a sad and disturbing commentary on this phenomenon.
Planeta.com, a site that bills itself as the global journal of practical ecotourism, is right now holding its 2010 Indigenous Tourism and Biodiversity Website Award, together with the Convention on Biological Diversity. The fifteen projects in the running receive votes from the public (that’s you!) and from a committee of highly experienced professionals in the field. Of course, these fifteen projects and those that were up for the award last year are good models of web marketing and even more importantly in our opinion, positive examples of indigenous tourism experiences.
But there are so many more indigenous tourism opportunities that are not able to compete for this award because they either don’t do the web or they are simply not among the top selected for the competition. In that case, we say as a tourist, you have to do your research. Find out as much as you can about the operators of the tour or hotel. Are they locally based and involved in the operation? Can you communicate with others who have participated in this experience and can answer some questions for you? What can the owners tell you about the local people and the impact of this tour or lodging on them? What evidence can they provide? Find out the information you can so that you may make a reasoned decision on whether this is the right tourist experience for you. Yes, the effort may seem tedious but it will be worth it – both to you and to the indigenous communities you are visiting.
