The earliest hunters and gatherers and nomads traveled in search of land and wildlife to sustain them. Tourism produces foreign domination and dependency, polarization, environmental destruction, cultural alienation, and the loss of social control and identity among host communities. Indigenous women, men, and children worldwide are exploited by the growing sex tourism industry. Some are forced into labor, as in Burma, to build hotel accommodations by a government well known for its abuse of human rights. For workers who once owned and worked the land, the hotels now barely pay them a living wage. Around the world there is a plundering of archaeological sites and illegal trade in wildlife and cultural artifacts. In Thailand, Hill Tracts people are viewed much like human zoo specimens by drug and adventure-seeking trekkers. In the Black Hills, the native Sioux work as low-wage laborers in a white-owned tourism industry that promotes their culture and lands. In the tropical jungles of the Amazon insensitive tourism operators have disrupted religious ceremonies, and even brought diseases like tuberculosis into indigenous communities.
Indigenous burial sites have been desecrated by resorts in Hawai'i and Bali. A Mohawk uprising in Canada was triggered by plans to extend a golf course on to Mohawk burial grounds. Beach hotels have displaced the fishing communities that once lined the coasts of Penang, Malaysia and Phuket, Thailand. Examples of the negative impacts of tourism upon indigenous peoples are numerous throughout history and continue largely unabated today. Tourism often creates conflict and resentment with local peoples, particularly once the realities of its impact become clear. This well-worn path, once limited to the rich or the resourceful academic, has now been deeply traced into the most isolated spaces on Mother Earth by a growing number of outsiders. This industry, is now a sundry crew of tourists, thrill-seekers, adventurers, bird and whale watchers, sports enthusiasts, cruise ships the size of cities, builders of airports, hotels and global communication systems, traveling scientists and academics, well-intentioned social justice activists, and millions of others. "Off-the-beaten-track" is, ironically, a very well-beaten path taken over the centuries by colonists, anthropologists, missionaries, developers, international aid agencies and World Bankers, environmentalists, and the ever-expanding tourism industry.
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