Regenerating tourism and regenerating people: how tourism is achieving justice for Indigenous youths

Abstract

In 2023 a novel Indigenous tourism venture was launched. This initiative, Native Nations–Tracing Indigenous Footsteps, offers a culturally immersive overseas exchange programme for Indigenous youths. It seeks to build solidarity, uplift youths, offer emancipatory tourism experiences, heal injustice, and reconnect them to sources of their strength and identity. As such, it offers an alternative approach and ethos to dominant approaches to tourism development. This paper examines the experience and outcomes of the first Native Nations exchange which involved a group of Aotearoa New Zealand Māori youths and a group of Australian Aboriginal youths. It frames this in the context of literature on justice tourism, Indigenous tourism, and regenerative tourism. Advocates of these approaches, variously, aim to restore people and environments through tourism experiences, to build solidarity between visitors and the visited, and to uphold Indigenous cultures and values. The research finds, firstly, that we need more focus on Indigenous people as tourists, and secondly, that regenerative tourism could have more transformative impacts if it explicitly incorporated tourism as justice, focusing attention on regenerating people who are often excluded from tourism’s benefits.