My dad grew up in the region around Ladakh. His village got a single paved road in 1982 and a single electric connection in 1985. Relatives would have to walk MILES in the cold and high elevation to get an elementary education, and child malnutrition and mortality was significant (my grandmother and a number of her peers had lost at least 1 child to diseases like typhus, cholera, etc). All this happened before the development that globalization brought. Globalization helped a number of people in our region gain access to a better quality of life than anything their parents or grandparents could imagine. In addition, the benefits of globalized culture and communication meant even positive aspects like women empowerment could start to gain a foothold - no longer would you have to aim only to study up to the 10th grade if you're lucky and become a housewife, now you can aim for college and become a professional. There are a number of issues in the modern world, but firangis in their ivory towers with their weird orientalized conceptions of the worlds are not in a position to talk about this subject.
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Thank you for your contribution. I understand that viewing it from said perspective doesn't account for the complete picture. That said, I believe we can agree that both sides can be true simultaneously? Standard of living is improved and worsened in certain regards. OP and the reference I'm sharing discuss some of the negative impacts to local cultures.
I can agree that some aspects of development may appear negative, but at least with regards to the negative aspects described in the Local Futures documentary (which btw is not something I'd treat as a reliable source - being a linguist trained under Chomsky doesn't make you an economic analyst for example) were already common before globalization came through - drunkards and opioid addicts always existed, the disparity between haves and have-nots always existed, and the traditional local power structures were inherently exclusionary. A lot of these kinds of documentaries tend to look nostalgically to some form of a utopian past, but if you have rose tinted glasses on, you don't see the red flags.
PS - I wouldn't extrapolate this conversation about indigenous communities in Inner Asia with those of the First Nations. There are a bunch of different political, economic, and social dynamics that cause this to be an apples to oranges comparison.
That's a fair point, thanks for shedding light on it from a closer perspective.