premised on competing claims that often predate documentation and are grounded in oral storytelling and mythologies. This is not to say that these evidence bodies are inherently less worthwhile than documented claims, but they are less ‘legible’ to the contemporary infrastructures which now make and enforce laws premised upon them (Scott, 1998). Through this lens, ‘indigeneity’ is not so clear-cut a concept as it first appears (Murray Li, 2000; Dove, 2006; Dunford, 2019; Gupta, 1998). At this point, it is worthwhile to begin closely considering the meanings of ‘indigeneity’, when and where those meanings arose, and how, in law, it is used as a tool for making claims. Across the world and across history, numerous terms have used to describe a similar temporal concept: ‘indigenous’, ‘aboriginal’, ‘First Nations’, ‘Native American’, ‘tribal’, ‘native’, and ‘autochthonous’, for example, correspond to and arose out of different contexts, but all imply a priority in time, even ‘immemorial occupancy’ (Kingsbury, 1998). In recent decades, especially since the 1970s, ‘indigeneity’ has become commonly used in the field of international law and re-defined as a tool for making legal and political claims. Tania Murray Li (2000) writes that a group’s self-identification as indigenous in this sense “is not natural or inevitable, but neither is it simply invented, adopted, or imposed” (151). Instead, it is an articulated position which emerges from and is utilized in specific contexts, as a concept and tool of international governance through which individuals or groups can make claims against the state. In this sense, it is a form of strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1993). This conceptualization of indigeneity, as a tool for articulating claims, largely emerged from a white settler colonial context (Kingsbury, 1998). It is not clearly defined: its international definitions vary widely, though all have a ‘time’ component. Its inclusion in international law was contested by major Asian nation-states, including China, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Indonesia, who made arguments to the UN that claims premised on indigeneity could only apply to white settler colonial contexts, thus rendering indigeneity claims against their states null (Baird, 2016). The opposite was argued by a large group of minority populations in those Asian states and others, including the Karen National Union in Myanmar, which raised attention to “the denial of some Asian governments of the existence of indigenous peoples in our part of the world” (Kingsbury, 1998: 417). The still-heated debate around the politics of indigeneity thus revolves around questions of who is making claims, who is able to make claims, who is included or excluded, and what evidence claims are premised upon. The complex history of Southeast Asia, and of the peoples who occupy the area, makes claims to indigeneity somewhat indistinct. Given the tenuousness of legible historical evidence, often the groups able to make claims of indigeneity were simply those with the greatest political power at the moment of independence, nation-building and citizenship law writing. Usually, those groups were granted power or seized power from the former colonial power—the Burmese, the Malay, the Viet, Lao, and Khmer, for     14