สารสนเทศข้อมูล

By nature, the indigenous peoples in Thailand are generally found with communities located on highland and/or remote forest area including those with offshore islands. Meanwhile there is none of actual number confirmed of their population since there is none of slot made for racial classification or profiling within the household survey and registration in Thailand, in addition, some of them have been left under statelessness or lack of nationality with inaccessible to all basic social services provided by the government. These also limit to the exercise of their rights to work and freedom of movement. Thus for the criteria with selection of marginalized and vulnerable indigenous groups within this project, it would be focusing on small size of population, in number of 200 to 6,000 persons, while some groups are also facing the extinction with life threat or dissolution of their culture, statelessness (not being civil members), landless and the loss of livelihood and their customary practices with dilution of cultures and identities.

The direction and policies for country development with assimilation and unity of populations and races in Thailand is overarching in various master plans developed with country stability and integrity, but on side of the mechanisms and tools for supporting the life quality development, e.g. for the education, it is mainstreamed with monopolized and uniformed curriculum; and for the healthcare system, public healthcare and welfare schemes provided are also supervised within only one-standardized scheme nationwide. These all have created impacts with threats to national security and challenges, as: the emerging of aged society with minimizing of household size; the poor or limited quality of healthcare system; and the declining of learning and studying on morality and goodness. And these all are also threats to indigenous peoples in Thailand too, as their livelihood and cultural identities would be marred or diluted, by the mainstream development somehow, as : the land dispute with exploitation of natural resources; the lack or poor of participation of folk communities towards natural resource management; the inaccessible to residential and arable areas, even they are occupying as ancestral domain lands but without title deeds; the problems of civil rights and personal legal status; the limits of livelihood and constraints to all folk communities residing on border of the country; and the ambiguity of status of groups with nomadic lifestyle, including those practicing hunting and gathering in forest or marine coastal areas with suspiciously illegal entries. These all cause the prejudice or bias towards ethnic diversity and once they have been repeatedly replicated through communications, narratives and discourses, the in-depth understandings with shaping-up of “the other within” concept has been made through making of identities of highlanders, hill tribes, marginalized persons, forest people or any other ethnic groups. The strong foundation of distinction between groups has been made with bias against and causing some of them falling into statelessness and nationality-lessness, while they have been exiting in Thailand for generations. Read more