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Nice thread JayR....though perhaps having spent time actually teaching with the Iban the likes of my fleeting vists to indigenous people doesn't amount to a hill of beans! But I thoroughly enjoyed local visits I organised with local people to a Himba village in Namibia. We went with a local settled Himba lady and brought two massive bags of staples like rice, corn, tinned goods, tobacco, snuf for chief etc. Also we had brought loads of bits and pieces of kids clothes, small toys etc from home and distributed them with random families and kids that touched our hearts along the way. Those stolen hours is small villages all through Sth Africa, Swazi, Bots & Nam are treasured memories for our our young men now on threshold of adulthood. 
Another absolutely wonderful tribal people were the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia. What a morning of bushcraft upskilling! I also spent 10 days with three Sherpa guides and three porters on the trail to Everest Base Camp. Perhaps if it were not for their excellent care of me I would not be talking to you today.....there's a story on here somewhere bout that also. Cheers...tks for prompting nice memories...

Hey J... there is one Iban family I try and meet up with every year when I get to Temburong. I make some excuse to slip away from the students for a few hours with Razit, my longboatman, and we fly with a light boat over the rapids and rock strewn channels to where his kids and extended family have gathered. It's usually just an occasion for me to teach the little'uns a little English and pseudo-science, while they give me a picnic, Iban-style, and we sit and chew the fat on a rock overlooking the river somewhere. Yes, that's communal alright.
There are also several people I meet up with in Kenya, or at least try, whenever I can. One of those is Anderson, #2 in my hour in the company of Kenyans piece from last year. I've been meeting with him every year for 12 now and he calls me the mzungu father of his kids. We are of similar height and age although he has been far more 'productive' than me.... they have fun teaching me kiswahili while I quiz them on maji ni uhai (water is life - amazing song if you're ever in that neck of the woods) and why trees are good. Another is an old boy who goes by the name John, a Njemps fisherman who has fished Baringo for decades and knows it like no other. We share a love of the lake and time with him is always special, mostly silent, interspersed with pithy statements of fact, then more silence. This pattern is only broken when his son, John, joins us with his son, John. Then all the tribe tend to party with millet beer because they still find it hilarious we're all called Jo(h)n....
Good thread! Cheers, J

I had a lovely but fleeting day with an 'otter fishing village' in Narail, Bangladesh. I was taken out on an old boat (made of bamboo not quite designed to handle a westerners weight!) for a demonstration of how they use semi-tame captive otters (poor things) to corral fish into nets. Funny thing is i quickly became the spectacle as people stopped to watch me watching them from bridges and the river bank! Afterwards, the fishermans wife unexpectedly served me a dish of fish fry and rice which i reeeally didn't want but i didn't want to be rude. My bowels somehow survived though. They were a lovely family, gorgeous children. On the way out it seemed my presence completely disrupted a lesson in the local school. As the teacher had already lost their attention i was invited inside. It was lovely. Beaming smiles and 5 minutes of fame! Very special day despite having not having a common word of language with anyone.

12 years ago i visited a beautiful hill village in south east Senegal. No roads, mud & thatch huts, topless ladies carrying piles of sticks (you know the kinda thing!). There was an innocence and authenticity to the place that made me feel uncomfortable intrusive. Not the Spanish couple i went there with though. They handed out freaking balloons and placed children in their laps for photos and thought they were being culturally sound. Mortifying.

Triabal tourism makes me cringe. Andamans? Omo? I was always fascinated by the extreme body art among some Omo tribes but i don't think i want to go there now.

Your Borneo experiences sound lovely though. Actually about the human contact.

   We spent a few days visiting and chatting to the Mising Tribe when we stayed on Majuli island (Assam). They live in bamboo bungalows built high off the ground on stilts. During the monsoon the Brahmaputra floods the entire area and they get about by canoe. They told me that every year they lose livestock in the floods. Jamie and I were invited inside one of the homes, which seemed quite flimsy (they creaked, a bit like walking/living on cane chairs).
   We have spent quite a lot of time with various tribes in the eastern Himalaya for the Mundo Challenge, staying in cow-dung houses.
   I'm not sure whether the fishermen of Sudan and Eritrea are indigenous, but we met plenty of them during the two months we sailed there. We bartered with them for lobsters, and gave them old clothes.
   Meeting people (and not just indigenous folk) is for me probably the most interesting and illuminating part of travel.

In my view, Johnny puts his finger on it when he writes it "made me feel uncomfortably intrusive".  If a people are indigenous in the UN sense, contact needs careful planning and great sensitivity (not that gawping at the locals in, say, Venice doesn't).  Like him I wonder about the Mursi, Hamer and other tribes of the Omo, who have adapted to incursions of money- and camera-bearing strangers, at whose antics they marvel.  And these "strangers" include the Highland Ethiopians who get out of the same coaches and live lives very different both from the Mursi and from the western tourists.
The key must be personal contact and the exchange of humanity - so Jean and Jon you pass (I'm too ignorant Liz to know whether your contacts count as indigenous in this sense) - but without something to offer, I have had no contact with indigenous peoples and do not expect any.
At the risk of stirring up an unboiling pot, I see that as quite different from visiting South African townships, Brazilian favelas, and poor Ethiopian homes both urban and rural, where the inhabitants share parts of our culture.

@Alan   When I read Jean's question I tried to decide before I posted what exactly we mean by "indigenous people", but couldn't come up with a concrete idea. (I immediately thought of the Australia's Aborigines and New Zealand's Maoris. Then I thought of the tribes of Asia and Africa—surely most of these continents are full of indigenous peoples—and what about the Inuit and Saami tribes in northern Europe? For that matter, what about the Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English? How far back do you have to trace your ancestry to be called "indigenous"?) Your comment challenged me to think a little deeper, so I did a Google search for the UN definition. There doesn't seem to be one. The most useful statement I found was in a pdf doc from the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Entitled "Indigenous peoples, indigenous voices", it says,
" ... the most fruitful approach is to identify, rather than define indigenous peoples.
This is based on the fundamental criterion of self-identification as underlined in a number of human rights documents.
The term “indigenous” has prevailed as a generic term for many years. In some countries, there may be preference for other terms including tribes, first peoples/nations, aboriginals, ethnic groups, adivasi, janajati. Occupational and geographical terms like hunter-gatherers, nomads, peasants, hill people, etc., also exist and for all practical purposes can be used interchangeably with “indigenous peoples”. ..."

I haven't been anywhere that is un-touched by progress or doesn't welcome tourism. A seventy-seven year old Limboo woman in Sikkim told me that her life was easier now than when she'd been a girl, that modern conveniences like electricity had improved her life. She also reiterated what everyone in Sikkim told me, that they welcome and encourage tourists to their tiny state. The Mising community couldn't have been more welcoming, insisting we go into their house and drink tea and hooch with them. I have found my encounters with tribes in India to be educational and rewarding (I hope for both parties). But Jamie and I always travel independently and seldom with other tourists. I can appreciate that turning up en masse in a coach, jumping out to take a few photos then speeding off again might be regarded as gawping intrusively.

I would never want to go anywhere that regarded me as an intruder, and if I felt that way I would pretty soon scarper.