Indigeneity with Andrew

Over millions of years, these living things have become well suited to their habitats, carefully adapted to the region's soil, climate, and food web. Or when it comes to people, there can make some confusion about what it means to be indigenous, especially when it comes to questions of land rights, autonomy,

and reparations. Most people understand that Native American nations and Aboriginal Australians are indigenous, but some might then ask, well, if indigenous means originating from a place, then aren't all whole sapiens indigenous to Africa? Why should one group's claim of indigenas you take precedence over any other. This will be asked in more or less good faith, and so others may ask the question, well, if a group occupies a region for several generations, does that then make them indigenous?

White Americans indigenous if their family has been there since they're found in the United States? A French people indigenous to France, and if so, does that somehow justify their xenophobia to water refugees. In some weird reactionary corruption of declonial rhetoric. Speaking of corruptions of de colonial rhetoric, some Zionists claim that Jewish people as a whole are indigenous

to Palestine in some twisted perversion of land back. While Zionism itself has long understood itself as a colonial project meant to displace and eliminate the indigenous inhabitants of past died from its very beginning. Some white nationalists also argue that settler colunism was really no different than any other conflict between indigenous people, So what does it even matter?

Might mix right and generations of marginalized groups have been struggling to retain their social, cultural, economic, and political sovereignty and achieve justice, reparations, liberation after centuries of oppression and attempted annihilation. We need to stand in informed solidarity. Thus, it is vital for us to understand what it means to be indigenous welcome, take it up in here. I'm Andrew Sage andrewism on YouTube, and I'm here again.

ways that indigenity can be defined or interpreted. One is as an identity formed as part of a colonial relationship, and two as an identity rooted in a relationship to police. I believe that each definition is incomplete without the other, but by understanding and synthesizing each notion of indigenousness, we

can better ground our approach decolonization and social revolution. So let's start with indignity as identity rooted in a relationship place, whether it be physical as with land, social as with community, or cultural as with culture. As indigenous, relationship to the land must be reciprocal, with give and take, base on a view of the land and water as a gift,

they must be cared for over generations. According to Dnotiony mythology, as recounted by Robin wild Chimera in Brilliant Sweet Grass, the mother goddess Skywoman came to the land as an immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land, learning from other species to understand how to live on it, given as she received, and caring for the earth and its keepers for the sake of those

who would inherit it when she passed on. Land is identity, it is ancestral connection, It is pharmacy, it is library, and it is home, the source of all the sustains and the sacred ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to the boot. So by this understanding it can be said that indignated is born out of land connection

and established through observation and relationship. Indigenous peoples have historically been mobile, either by choice or by force, but regardless of where they might find themselves quote unquote, homeland or not even if there were other indigenous peoples in their new environments. As long as they observe the processes and ceremonies of generational relationship building based on mutual respect, understanding, and love for the land in common, there remained indigenous.

So then the question may arise, why aren't settlers indigenous to place if their family has lived in the land for generations. The answer lies in relationship. Settler society as a whole is based on an extractivist capitalist relationship with the land, focus on exploiting the land and its natural resources. Without a relationship with the land that extends the reference to a deeper understanding of its comp likes interdependence, settler

society can never become indigenous to place. Of course, it goes without saying that not every indigenous group or indigious practice is perfectly sustainable. Some have been rather destructive and even speciocidal, particularly when they have recently moved into a place,

as we could see in North American prehistory. But if we are to work with this definition to conceive of being indigenous as something based and cultivating a long term relationship to place, then indigenity must be contingent on maintaining the health and longevity of that relationship. Without community, they cannot be indignity, much like the trees in a forest are interconnected via subterranean networks of microreze which enable them

to share resources and survive as a whole. In order to be indigenous to place, community must exist sustain that web of reciprocity with the land so that all may flourish. Indigenacy to place extends to culture as well, which is deeply tied to the land it develops on. Such practices should be reciprocal, as ceremonies create communities, and communities create ceremonies as well as organic, not appropriating existing cultural celebrations

or tending toward the commercial. Our social fabric has become withered and fragmented by the peace of modern life, leaving little room for ceremonies outside of religion or rights of personal transitions such as birth. These weddings and funerals, but ceremonies and the shared emotions they generate are part of what builds community. When we gather for graduations, for example, a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia, and excitement builds in

the social atmosphere. Hopefully fueling the confidence and strength of those who are going on to pursue the rest of their lives. But Kimura wants us to imagine standing by a river flooded with those same feelings as the salmon march into the auditorium of the estuary. Being indigenous to police means cultivating cultural ceremonies that on other land and all the cycles and seasons of life within it. What are your thoughts on that interpretation or approach to indigenousity.

a relationship to colonialism. Yeah, but you know, there's some sort of fun question mark examples of like the Chinese Empire failing this where it's like like you do have a lot of stuff that's like, Okay, we're going to like build a relationship in nature, but the build a relationship to nature stuff is like we are going to clear this forest in order to build a temple that is like exactly set up on like a pentagram or whatever. And so it's like.

idea of indignity as a colonial relationship. According to Taiyaki Alfred and Jeff Quantusil, indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. It is an experience oppositional to colonial societies and states, and a consciousness of struggle again and such forces of colonization.

No two indigenous groups are exactly alike. Of course, there is a significant diversity in their cultures, contexts, and relationships with colonial forces, but they do share that struggle to survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile to their existence. Efforts to marginalize and eradicate indigenous peoples may not always be as overt as they once were, but the historic and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the erasure of Indigenous histories, geographies,

and languages, and the current situation of deprivation persist. Nonetheless, even so called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality that Indigenous people remain, as in earlier colonial eras fundamentally occupied and disempowered peoples, stripped of autonomy in their own homelands and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an inherently unjust colonial order just in show their basic physical survival.

By this understanding of indigenity, it can be said that without a colonizer, without systems in place and actions being taken to marginalize, disempower, and destroy their societies in fear of a colonial replacement, there is no indigenous. Without colonialism, there would be no status of indigenous to be imposed upon the groups of peoples whose very existence and claimed

land is an obstacle to that colonial endeavor. The un Working Group on Indigenous Issues drew partially from this understanding when they attempted to define indigenous peoples in nineteen eighty six quote Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which having a historical continuity with pre invasion and pre colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors other societies now prevailing on those territories or

parts of them. They form at present non dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity as the basis of their continued existence as peoples in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal systems.

And so by this definition, the Ammerindians in the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasis in India, Native North and South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, kurds Assyrians, Yazidi Palestinians, am Sikh Sambi, Basques, Hawaiians, Maori, san Wuti, Papuans, Charms, and many many more are all indigenous peoples layers of nuance yet to be highlighted. The colonial situation is not a simple binary of indigenous and colonizer.

For example, in the Americas, we have the immigrant situation and the situation of slavery right where Africans are concerned they were indigenous to their own homelands but displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime. They may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they were not driving settled colonial society either. In fact, historically some were actually enslaved by

indigenous people as well. And at the same time there were members of the African diaspora who would join existing indigenous societies and later create their own, such as the Garifuna of Saint Vincent Tranduras and belize it's very attractive, I would say, or mentally compelling to fall into these kinds of binaries colonizer and visions. But we should not allow these constructs to pendhula picture.

was like huge Curtish participation in the Armenian genocide. And if you look at the Kurdish regional government in a rock when I want to talk about the pew Id that's like like Curtish Freedom movement in Syria in a rock, there's like the Iraqi Kurdish Regional government, right, which is run by a different group, but those people, you know, and this is one of these things where like there

are Kurtish people on both sides of this conflict. Like that group attempted to, for example, like prevent ezd people from returning to their homes after they were like genocided there from there by isis right. So it's this it's this thing where like all of this stuff gets kind of messy depending on like who has power in a

given moment. And it's something that's to some extent fluid enough that you can on the one hand, like be experiencing a genocide and then also immediately turn around and you know, be be the Kurdish regional government and attempt to assist the genocide, to attempt to like do a genocide against the disease you can take more of their land.

of domination, abuse of pressure, and harm. People look at the example of Israel a lot, but a less similiar example for some would be the situation that established Liberia in Africa. You know, where you literally had the descendants of the slave people or formerly in slave of people going on to engage in settler clunalism in the territory that became Liberia, to oppress and disadvantage the indigenous populations that previously occupy those territories, and well continue to occupy

those territories today. They created a stratifyed tociety that placed them on the top, mirroring the very system that they had fled.

in Bosnia, you see this Rwanda. This is a very very common sort of I don't even know what you call it, like trope feels like two weeks of a word. This is a very common step in the beginning of genocide, which I don't love. Uh So you're right, of ten Mia not pro genocide more news at ten.

that haven't recognized indigenous peoples within their borders. All four of the countries that rejected the resolution, Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand will later changed their vote in favor of the declaration of course of their own tact on interpretations and embassies, and the declarations legally non binded nature as is to be expected from set the colonial societies.

continued exystems as people, et cetera, et cetera. You know, it speaks of those having historical continuancy with pre invasion pre codeal societies that developed in their territories. They speak of groups that consider themselves distinct from other sectors as

societies and all prevailing on those territories. And so by this definition, I understand that people in these Asian countries maybe like, oh, we're all from this place, right, so why does that group get this desert nation and aditioners, So while we do not, And it goes back to again a colonial relationship. It goes back to the relationship

between a group and the broader society. And so it's not necessarily stripping away the fact that a particular group may be from an area, but more so speaking about how another group relates to the states in that area and the group that dominates the state in that area.

So while it may not be that this relation of indignity is based on the Europeans at loclonialism, there is something to the history of empire in those areas, establish in those relationships, relationships that would later be elevated in some cases by those Europeans when they would come and they would for example, select one ethnic group and elevate one ethnic group over another ethnic group, make us in ethnic group administrators and put down another ethnic group, classify

these kind of caste systems and ethnocratic divisions.

that Europeans set up past systems. Sometimes that's not true though, And one of the I think most hideous examples of this is West Papua, which we very briefly mentioned earlier, where West Papua and Indonesia are like not governed by the same colonial administration, but when Indonesia gains independence, like the government there and this is this is Sankara's government, right, This is like the nominally socialist one wants to take control of West Papua because West Papua has all of

these resources, and the people in West Papua don't want that, like they want to be an independence entity. But the Indonesians just roll in and invade them and you know, continue from Sukara to Sukarno. Just a unbelievably hideous series

of genocides. And one of the things that's really bleak about the sort of process of decolonization is like you can see this shift in the way that these post colonial societies are talking about what colonization is and we're resistance to it, where it ceases to become about the struggle of people against the colonizing forces that oppress them, and it turns into a something that's about like the

continuity of national borders. You know, you get a really bleak example of this where like people talk about like the Bandung conference, right, which is the sort of like it's supposed to be, like this is like the big thing in like pan Asian and pan African like struggles coming together. We're like all these formally colonized nations like come together and like issue this issue a bunch of things, and it's supposed to be this big moment of like

this is like the unity of post colonial societies. That's like still to this day look back on in terms of like Affrouasian solidarity, like this is the big one. But one of the things that they ratified at ban Dung was a very small session that no one pays any attention to, which is all of these countries put in their support for Indonesia's occupation of West Papua hum. Eventually, I'm going to do a long thing about this. It just is a really difficult subject that tackle on has

to be done very carefully. But one of the things that happens is, you know, like the West Papua WANs go to the UN and all of the states that you would normally think of as like the anti colonial states are like no, fuck you, like you belong to Indonesia.

And then you get all of these other countries who are like more neutral or more US aligned, but because they're not allied with Indonesia, their reaction is like wait, hold on, what do you mean there are black people in the Pacific A and be like, holy shit, this

is fucked up. But it sets this precedent that kind of like rolls on through like pan Arabism and rolls on through a lot of these decolonial movements where once you've gotten your state, it's fine to just like do horrifying repression against any other sort of ethnic group that's there, because now that now that you have your post colonial state, like, any attempt to interfere with the sovereignty of the state and change the borders, even if it's like, I don't know,

you're like the West Sahara, or you know, you're like shing Jan, or you're like the Kurds, right, and any attempt for those people to like get their freedom is seen as like a Western back like separatist thing instead of an anti colonial struggle. And I think that really was one of the things that was like the death knell for like the post colonial movements was their willingness to just walk in and machine gun people because we want the resources that these people's lands are on.

colonizer indigenous relationship. Is it that we seek to pursue a universalization of indigenity to the former and by that process accomplish the matter, or is it there's some other framework or approach by which we can take on this topic of Okay, do we proceed the with the with the concept of indigenity or does the concept of indigenity exist as a by products and a representation of the system that we are trying to get aware you're from, Yeah.

so on. It is as anarchists would approach it, an ongoing and heterogenous change in people's powers, drives and consciousness through practical education, as well as a progressive breakdown and transformation of the existing systems and institutions, alongside the building of new systems institutions punctuated by major insurrections, ruptures, advances.

That whole messy process with the aim of self liberation. Yeah, something that I've broken down as involved in confrontation with the powers that be, non cooperation with the established order of things, and the prefiguration of new social relations, institutions, infrastructure,

and practices in the hered now. If we maintain the interpretation of indigeneity as based in one's position in a colonial relationship, then the decolonization process will until the abolition of that relationship as the premise of identity and therefore

the abolition of indignity as a status. Colonial legacies have effectively left indigenous communities legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally, socially and spiritually weakened within the narrow parameters of the state, where they end up diverting the crucial energy necessary to confront state power and develop the process of deconalization toward mimicking the practices of the dominant non additional legal political

institutions through the processes of land claims and self government, and by pursuing these strategies, I think what we notice is this tends toward a division rather than a solidarity building division both internally and between indigenous communities, where land claims, for example, clash, or where certain members of a society of a community utilize their position above others in that society community to gain certain advantages for themselves, sometimes to

the detriment of the society or community. So I think any sort of appros deconization has to account for the way is that some approaches the de econalization can end up perhaps misdirecting from a subjective perspective, the work that is necessary to dismantle the clonal order, rather than merely assert a position was in it. But this idea of indigenity via colonization is just one understanding of the term, and my approach to it is of course one subjective

interpretation of that definition, and where it might lead. We need to explore another approach, I think to deconization, and one that recognizes the power and potential of Indigenous relationships

with the land. Now Globally, the UN recognizes that indigenous peoples protect eighty percent of the world's remain in bio diversity, and scientists have shown that indigenous management practices in Brazil, Canada, and Australia provides the same level of ecosystem support and protection as any imposed protected area, which makes it aboutly clear that the colonial approach of conservation via session removes the very people who take care of our most important ecosystems.

I don't believe that merely building a connection with the land can make someone indigenous, but not being indigenous doesn't exclude us from aiden in the renewal of the indigenous world. Kimura uses the example of the broad leaf planter, also known as the white Man's footprint. Despite not being indigenous to the Americas, it has become an honored member of the plant community because it lives as a good neighbor

instead of as a destructive invader. While other invasive species poison the soil over around the land outcompete indigenous species, the white Man's footprint took on a strategy of helpful co existence, even sharing some of its healing properties with those who ask of it. It is not indigenous, but

it has become naturalized to code Chimera. Being naturalized a place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill the spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters. To take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all

of our relatives depend on it, because they do. End quote, Decolonization will require us to uproot invasive, capitalist settler societies in order to rebuild in a way that treats the land like the home that we share and are responsible for. It will require us to receive an honor knowledge in the land, to care for its keepers, and to pass on that knowledge to the next generation. As always, all power to all the people.