Inventing Indigenous

The anatomy of a progressive meme

We’re supposed to say Indigenous now. You heard that right? In a decade when new rightspeak emerges weekly, Indigenous popped up in lieu of Native sometime late in 2021 within my field and quickly worked its way into editorial style guides. Now discourse citing Indigeneity is everywhere, from North American Indian movements to Palestinian rights, and even the European Nationalist far right.

In the process, Indigenous became less a rote descriptor of origins than part of the lexicon of progressive politics. Those terms have life cycles that go something like this:

1. Choose a term and co-opt its meaning through rhetorical manipulation (e.g., White)

2. Promote term as the new right way to think and speak (e.g., Whiteness)

3. Expand definition to dilute meaning further (e.g., White adjacent)

4. Strip phrase of all meaning entirely (e.g., Black White Supremacy)

5. Suffer mocking contempt, blame others, and start over again

If I had to guess, Indigenous is somewhere between heavily diluted and meaningless, but well on its way to mocking contempt. The term is nearing its inevitable end alongside Latinx and Chestfeeders. That’s too bad. It was actually a pretty useful word, but such is the corrupting influence of identity politics on the English language. Nearing its end, it’s worth reflecting on how Indigenous was transformed by activists from a simple description of provenance to a global political cause.

Strangers in their own land

This topic first drew my attention during a lecture by a visiting anthropologist who spoke about his long career working with South Africa’s Kalahari San. I’ve admired this guy for years and his lecture was excellent, deftly weaving personal anecdotes and anthropological theory together alongside beautiful photographs of San daily life.

Toward the end of his talk, I realized that he had been referring to the San as an Indigenous population, recognized as such by the African Nation-States in which they live. African Nations are, for the most part, now run by Africans, who by the classic definition would all be considered Indigenous. Nevertheless, I knew what he was talking about and didn’t think to question the term until late in the talk. How does a subset of Africans become Indigenous while others do not? Obviously the term had evolved right under our noses without anybody really noticing.

Indigenous Origins

In the beginning was the word and the word was benign. Indigenous was mostly used to describe plants and animals and nematodes that originated from any given place. It was the opposite of introduced or exogenous. According to Google Ngram, people weren’t really considered Indigenous at all until the mid 1940s and it didn’t take off in earnest until the 1980s. Today, Indigenous subsumes a wide range of meanings depending on context. It’s one of those things: you know it’s Indigenous because the way it is.

When we started calling people Indigenous in the 1980s, its definition remained largely intact. The term applied specifically to people that experienced colonization by western European Nations between the 16th and 19th centuries. Indigenous populations were living in those places prior to western contact. They were original to that land.

But even within this modest extension of the Indigenous concept from nature to culture, there exists enough ambiguity to suggest that the term was never a great fit for people in the first place. Grouping all non-Western people into a single Indigenous group vastly underestimates the true range of cultures that existed prior to western contact, reducing great cultural diversity into an unrealistically monotypic whole. In truth, there has never been a singular Indigenous people in the Americas, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, or any other corner of the globe touched by European expansion. Rather, there were and remain thousands of unique cultures each of which impacted by western expansion in unique ways.

And beyond that, wars of conquest have existed for all time and among all people globally, and the Indigenous/Colonizer dichotomy tends to wither in the face of that reality. The Indigenous people of the American southwest living 2,000 years ago probably weren’t too fond of their ancestral lands being colonized by Chacoan outsiders from the south. And the chiefdoms of the Peruvian Andes probably felt similarly about invading Incan forces intent on expanding their empire. Should we consider these wars of conquest intra-Indigenous conflict? Or is there room in the big Indigenous tent for reformed colonizers? Perhaps Indigenous isn’t a great term for describe a species characterized by their tendency to move and conquer on a regular basis.

Indigenous Lifeways

At some point in the 90s the Indigenous concept crept in meaning toward a lifestyle rather than a place of origin. Specifically, Indigenous became a catchall term for people that never began growing food or participating in market economies. Given the term’s origins, it makes sense. Those countries colonized by western Europe were largely still embedded within pre-agricultural subsistence practices. And even if they did grow food or raise animals, none had market economies of the European variety. Thus, the term Indigenous, though it refers originally to provenance, came to be closely associated with socio-economic practices. Eventually, many populations never colonized came to be called Indigenous as well.

This is why one can identify Indigenous Africans in a continent full of Africans. Those Africans who participate in a market economy and purchase their food are modern. Those who forage and hunt are Indigenous. I’m sure there are ethnic distinctions I’m missing, but it doesn’t change the fact that African notions of Indigeneity based in lifeways need not implicate Western colonialism.

It’s similar at the margins of Europe, where modern Scandinavians come into contact with Sami reindeer herders from the east. The Sami were recently described as possessing Europe’s only “indigenous cuisine,“ as if schnitzel, fried cod, or coq au vin don’t count. What they meant, of course, was that the Sami were a little…different than the rest of Europe. They were traditionally subsistence pastoralists, living at Europe’s margins in a semi-nomadic lifestyle. They practiced animism and participated minimally in Europe’s market economy. They are from a distinct genetic stock, related more closely to other Siberian pastoralists than the Nordic populations to their south. Thus, even though native Scandinavians have just as much, if not MORE claim to Indigenous roots as the Sami in the classic formulation of the term, the Sami get the title. They live an Indigenous lifeway. Modern Norwegens do not.

One of 3 or 4 memes I’ve ever made

Indigenous Politics

Within the last 15 years, Indigenous became a global political cause alongside the ascendence of identity politics. The lower case indigenous descriptor became a capitalized Indigenous identity. Indigenous politics diluted the term’s meaning further to a dichotomous description of power. The oppressed are Indigenous and everyone else is the oppressor. In the currency of identity politics, Indigeneity has emerged as one of the most powerful identities in the progressive stack, that hierarchy of oppression used to to sort the world by degrees of privilege. Indigenous is the rarest card in the deck, the sole move that trumps Black Trans Sex Worker in oppression poker.

There’s some truth to that notion. Colonized people are among the world’s most disenfranchised, and the effort to improve their lives through a unified Indigenous politics could result in tangible gains.

But the turn from provenance to power descriptor has also resulted in some odd revisions to the Indigenous concept. For instance, India is routinely left out of the Indigenous coalition as if it weren’t colonized by the British for almost 200 years. Indians certainly meet the Indigenous criteria as originally defined, but they were too eager to grow food and engage in market transactions to qualify for the global Indigenous political movement. Similarly, white people are most certainly NOT Indigenous even if their ancestors have sewn the same wheat field on the outskirts of Warsaw for 1,000 years. White people are primarily indigenous to western Eurasia and the Middle East, but outside of some small, unsavory political circles, talk of ‘white indigenous rights’ tends to make people nervous.

Meanwhile, there exists a global coalition of strange bedfellows whose only unifying attribute is a vague sense of Indigeneity. There’s not a lot of common ground between a Sami reindeer herder, a Maori politician, a San hunter, and a 1/16th Metis professor at Portland State University besides a shared Indigenous political identity. Similarly, recent US government policy that prioritizes “Indigenous knowledge” in decision making implies the existence of a body of knowledge common to all Indigenous North Americans, as if the cosmology of the Iroquois Confederacy shares any meaningful commonalities with that of California’s Owens Valley Paiute a continent away. That sort of cultural reductionism is really kind of…well…racist. But Indigeneity has real political power, so most people with even a hint of entitlement to it are willing to cash in some of their culture for a slice of the pie.

I can’t leave this topic without addressing the elephant in the room. Nothing has pushed Indigenous toward the “mocking contempt” phase of progressive discourse like the debate about who’s more Indigenous: Israelis or Palestinians. The Levant is the crossroads of humanity, the strip of land between Africa and Asia conquered and abandoned and reconquered again for most of human history. Each one of my non sub-Saharan African readers has an ancestor who spend a little time as a Levantine. The debate over who is more Indigenous to the region is fundamentally ludicrous, motivated entirely by the cultural capital of Indigenous identity rather than reality.

Indigenous Sunset

As Indigenous flickers from relevancy, social scientists should consider abandoning the term completely alongside the larger abandonment of identity politics from public discourse. Indigenous was never a great fit for humans, and it’s become so laden with political baggage that it no longer possesses much meaning at all.

Specifically, archaeologists should probably stop using the term “Indigenous archaeology” and should certainly stop using its spinoffs (Paleoindigenous? c’mon). Those archaeologists with American Indian ancestry who describe themselves as Indigenous archaeologists should consider embracing their specific ancestral identity rather than the homogenized Indigenous one. Sioux, Pawnee, Iroquois, and Paiute archaeologist sounds cooler anyway. Better yet, just be an archaeologist and stop racializing your profession.

Oh and white people, stop trying to make white indigeneity happen. Even you, Irish people. You’re making everyone uncomfortable.