Hear, hear!
Anyway, I trace my ancestry back to the Russian steppes. At least, that seems to be where my body was designed to live. I do well in the cold, and very poorly in heat. But I don’t claim indigenous status there. Because yeah, all cultural continuity to those ancestors has been lost. They were pretty much all killed or dispersed. And I don’t think my ancestors were the first people there, I think they displaced people who no longer have any cultural descendants.
If indigenous means that your ancestors were pretty much always there, there’s almost no one who is indigenous anywhere. The history of humankind is to drive out other people and take their land. The peoples who currently inhabit Europe mostly drove out the hunter-gatherers who lived there before. And there were multiple waves of faming people who drove out the earlier colonists. Same with most of Africa. The most successful and advanced African peoples drove out the people who were there before them. That’s probably what happened in Asia, too. God knows the history of the middle east is a history of wave after wave of conquest and migration. But I suspect we know this mostly because there’s been a lot of people writing history in the middle east.
Thank you!
That’s not actually the case - just that those indigenes tend to be minorities and oppressed in the place.
But South African Khoe-khoen, the Australian Aborigines, the Maoris and other Polynesians, etc are all still living where AFAWK they were the very first humans, and others like many (but not all) Native Americans, various Asian indigenous minorities, hell, even some European groups like the Sami, are also indigenous by virtue of having lived there so long as to be completely of that place, even if they did displace some long-erased group to be there.
“pretty much always” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, basically, way beyond the use of “Indigenous” as a term of art in e.g the development and NGO communities.
Note how "Form non-dominant groups of society " is a big factor there, as well. When “indigenous people” is used as an actual term of art in these circles, it’s clear they’re considered as a subset of marginalized minorities, not just “the people who live in a place.” That’s certainly the sense I’m used to using it in.
My phrase is how I’ve heard the word used in the past. So yes,
Are groups that i think of when i see the word “indigenous”. From whatever dictionary Google gives me:
- originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native.
- (of people) inhabiting or existing in a land from the earliest times or from before the arrival of colonists
So it’s pretty weird to me to see claims that either Israeli Jews or Palestinian Arabs are indigenous to anywhere. Both descend from peoples who have both pushed out other groups and been pushed out themselves at various times in history. Both have been colonists and been displaced by other colonists. But words change, and have different meanings in different contexts.
I see Wikipedia give a broader and vaguer description:
There is no generally accepted definition of Indigenous peoples ,[a][1][2][3] although in the 21st century the focus has been on self-identification, cultural difference from other groups in a state, a special relationship with their traditional territory, and an experience of subjugation and discrimination under a dominant cultural model.
And of course, because both Christianity and Islam spread in large part by conversions, I have to think that some of the ancestors of the Christian and Muslim Palestinians were the remaining Israelites of yore. They probably have more Israelite blood, on average, than the typical Jew. But i think they trace their decent from Ishmael, not Isaac.
Now that the OP of this thread, @ParallelLines – who started this thread for a specific and worthwhile purpose – has respectfully asked, at least twice, for everyone to take their pet discussions to the relevant threads instead of this one, and has been ignored or told to fuck off, I guess it’s time for a new thread, now that this one has been derailed all to hell with everyone selfishly pursuing their own pet interests with reckless abandon. Even mods are now jumping in to help further the train wreck.
Maybe we could call the new thread “What were you THINKING, redux – the actual thread”?
Judging by prior history, it might last maybe six months before that one goes totally off the rails, too. Then we could have “What were you THINKING, redux V2.0 – the new actual thread”
But please do carry on. I know you will. Meanwhile I’m putting this fucking train wreck on mute.
I think I’ll do the same.
@Miller, Can I pull this Israel/Palestine argument out of the thread? It will take a while, but I’m willing to do it.
Sure, go for it.
108 posts moved to its own thread from the What are you THINKING thread.
Thanks, @What_Exit
That is an internally consistent definition at least, though not necessarily one I agree with. Regardless, by that definition, there are no indigenous groups left in the Middle East. If you’re a Sapien Supremacist then the indigenous people of the Levant were the long dead Natufians; if you’re a bit more inclusive, then of course the Natufians were genocidal colonizers who wiped out the native Neanderthal populations of the Levant (and I’m sure they weren’t all rainbows and unicorns when it came to the Erectus that preceeded them).
So just to be clear, you would not consider the Zulu, for example, to be indigenous to South Africa?
That, generally speaking, is not how I have heard the term used (though I agree that it is a much more internally consistent definition than the one I generally see).
Your own link defines “indigenous” as:
All of these criteria apply to both the Zulu and the Jewish people, if we assume that “pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies” refers to colonialization/settlement by white Europeans specifically. If we include all forms of “colonialism or settlement” then of course the Bantu Migration eliminates the Zulu, and the Jewish people as stated came after the displacement of the Natufian hunter-gatherer culture by Neolithic herding and agricultural societies.
We could assume they mean any settlement or colonization, which would be closer to your definition. But then, I don’t think that their example of the Lakota applies. The peoples that fit your definition are invariably located somewhere extremely remote, where the constant churn and turnover of human populations did not reach them. Basically the whole stretch of Eurasia, throwing in North and East Africa as well, has been peopled since before we were Sapiens; and a similar churn took place up and down the Americas. Only places that are so remote that we only made it there a handful of times are not part of this experience.
So back to the Lakota - where are they “indigenous” to, by your definition? Nowhere the Lakota lived were they the first humans to ever do so. So I don’t think you are using the same definition as this PDF is (though as I said, your definition is more internally consistent than theirs).
I would not. I believe the Zulu farmers colonized South Africa, displacing most of the Khoe-khoe and San who probably were indigenous. And no, i don’t consider either Arab Palestinians or Jewish Israelis to be indigenous. This discussion is literally the first time I’ve seen a serious attempt to label either of those groups “indigenous”.
Yup.
And i don’t know why you brought up the Lakota. I never mentioned them, and have no opinion as to whether they are indigenous anywhere. Most native Americans aren’t. They moved around and conquered each other and stole each other’s lands, too.
I thought I made that clear in my post, but maybe not.
@MrDibble posted a link to a PDF that defines Indigenous and also gives some examples, and of those examples the Lakota are the clearest example of a group that definitely does not meet MrDibble’s definition. So I brought them up to say that the link does not support his definition.
I agree that by MrDibble’s definition, the Lakota are not indigenous. But the definition in the link is broader.
Well, MrDibble’s link would qualify both Palestinians and Israelis as indigenous:
All of those bullets apply to both Israelis, Palestinians, the Zulu, and the Lakota.
I thought @MrDibble was using a broader definition than i was. But if that’s directed at him, and not me, then I’ll let him answer your question. I’m sticking with, “i have no opinion regarding the Lakota”. (I might develop an opinion if i did more research, but it doesn’t seem really relevant to me.)
Eta: i see you were actually replying to his post, not one of mine. Sorry.
Would you consider the amaNdebele to be indigenous to south west Zimbabwe?
They were originally a faction of the amaZulu, who themselves were Bantu tribes orginating in central or west-central Africa.
People move, via conquest or exile, constantly.
I think your question is specious at best.
I am not well educated enough about that particular group to give you a firm answer, but here are the questions I would consider.
Are they a culture that developed in that land? Do they have strong cultural ties to that land? Is there a different land where they came from that they maintain strong cultural ties to?
If the answer to the first two questions is “yes” and the third one is “no”, then I would consider that group’s homeland to be that land, even if it is also the homeland of other groups.
I don’t see a big distinction between “this land is this group’s homeland” and “this group is indigenous to this land”, but if that is the source of disagreement I am open to being persuaded on that point.
(Maybe we should treat humans like any other species in biology, and conclude we are all Native to the Great Rift Valley and Invasive everywhere else!)
As I said above I consider myself too ignorant on this group in particular to firmly tell you if they are indigenous or not, but your Wikipedia link does say this:
Emphasis mine - so Wikipedia says “yes”, and I say “I don’t know, but see above to understand my thought process”.
No, they haven’t. Many Native American tribes were wiped out entirely. The survivors of many of the others were moved entirely.
I very much doubt you can talk the human species into that, though. While some people don’t seem to have the connection (and IME very often don’t understand those who do), connection with particular land goes very deep in the species; and in very many other species as well.
National borders may be another matter. These are now often arbitrary lines drawn by people who don’t live in the areas they run through, and which may not match at all with the actual lives of the people who do live there.
I don’t think that helps this issue, however. Much of the argument seems to be between people whose connection is with the same house; the same olive grove; the same patch of dirt. It may look like any other patch of dirt to people who don’t form that type of connection, or even to some of those who do but who have done so in some entirely different area. But it’s not exchangeable for any other patch for the people who love that particular one.
– and by this point, very many of the Palestinians are claiming land that neither they nor their parents nor in some cases their grandparents ever set foot on. So if what some people are saying is that ancestral rights don’t count: that should go for both sides. But I very much doubt that a peace treaty saying ‘everybody’s got an absolute right to the specific spot they were living on in 2022’ is achievable – if only because there are too many people whose power depends on their followers remaining insistent on reclaiming land others have been living on for three generations, as well as land others have been living on for very much longer than that.
Yes, I know you wrote that. But given that you also seem to think that the solution for multiple generations of discrimination and pogroms leading up to and including the Holocaust, with full acceptance never on the table anywhere in Europe, would have been for the surviving Jews in Europe to be required to stay there – I don’t see how you get from one of those things to the other.
I’m not clear as to which one I’m posting this in?
If the wrong one, please tell me.
Yeah, I think it’s difficult to come up with a definition that says one of those groups is indigenous and the other one isn’t.
You’re posting to the right one.
I am not tracking this thread and an happy to be not reading or even glancing at it any more.