Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Tourism: The Pattern of Exploitation, Assimilation and Erasure

In recent years, Indigenous tourism has surged in popularity, whilst often praised for being ethical and sustainable, for Indigenous communities globally. This article argues that this portrayal is the antithesis of what the reality is. Instead, Indigenous tourism will be argued to operate as a settler colonial structure that functions to strip Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and cultures of their deeper meanings, stylising the Indigenous into romanticised commodified packages that are less politically challenging to the settler hegemonic state. To investigate this, the article employs settler colonial theory and the analytical tool of settler bricolage to explore the constructed realities within tourism in order to reveal the colonial infrastructure that continuously recontextualises Indigenous identities for settler benefit. The article therefore positions itself in spanning the underexplored relation of Indigenous tourism and colonial infrastructures that distort and alter Indigenous representations.