Qualms about the term “indigenous people”

DISCLAIMER: I want to emphasise that I am not disparaging the claims of indigenous people to their land, nor belittling the many injustices that were made to such groups around the world. I would appreciate it if you could read the whole thing, but otherwise there’s a tldr at the end.

I have been preoccupied recently with the concept of indigenous people and nations in general, mostly spurred from reading history, particularly ancient history. It has struck me that in virtually any place on Earth people have walked on, its inhabitants have been far from static. They’ve changed through constant migration, war and intermixing. 

This would seem more true in our time than ancient ones. We currently have nominally free movement and a constant refugee crisis, while in olden times one might stay in their birth village for their entire life. However, I would argue that because of the lack of strict border controls and the modern rigid concept of the nation-state, flows of people were more likely to intermix “naturally,” and at an overview we can see cultures mix more tightly than they do today. One example may be the US, where you would expect the greatest admixture of cultures, yet you can easily still see huge cultural rifts.

This brings me to my actual point. If we were to look at any one place on Earth– say Mesopotamia, we would see widely different groups of people depending on the time we would’ve looked. From Sumerians to Persians to the modern Iraqis, and further any number of small groups of peoples. The peoples living there shifted by migrations, forced or otherwise, the combination of multiple cultures into one, conquests, and more. If you would test them genetically, some would appear close to groups living today (either in the same place or elsewhere), and some would not.

Similarly, we think about the native Mexica people of Mesoamerica as the natives there, but is that not a European-centric way of thinking? They were the rulers at the time of first European contact. Had they arrived a hundred years sooner or perhaps later, they would have found a very different mix of people, and we today might view them differently as well.

Yet, humanity as a collective would agree that most of those respective swaths of land belong to the Iraqis or the Mexica as they are the indigenous people of that country. That notion is something that bugs me somewhat. Why did we decide that in some specific time or era in the long human history (and prehistory) groups of people are “set” and can no longer change? That their location during that period of time is where they ought to be and have a birthright to. This might be because of our greater and more continuous knowledge of history.

It is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of a birthright to a certain piece of land, which I could not see as being owned by someone (or some peoples) as much as you could own the clouds. At the same time, I understand the rights of minorities or previous inhabitants of a place, particularly in the light of colonialism where the colonial power is still the one with the upper hand today. 

For me, these are two concepts that I have a hard time reconciling. The way I can reconcile it is by saying that we should let the shared ownership of all the Earth and its resources be our guiding light while at the same time acknowledging the dispossession of such things, particularly where the aggressor and victim have a clear and direct line to modern groups. At the same time, it feels important to me that we let go somewhat of the concept of ownership of that contested land, even if this causes some people to “lose out”.

tldr; because of the constant admixture, conquests and migrations throughout human history, it seems to me that the concept of a birthright or an inalienable tie to a piece of land is outdated and should be acknowledged as such while still working towards social justice by those harmed by colonialism and related wrongs.

I feel it is remiss not to end on a personal note, with the risk of adding oil to what is already quite a fiery topic. I reside in Israel, which is a land that is predicated exactly on the idea that some people have a birthright to a certain piece of land, and today is at a conflict with people who have the exact same claims. Arguments over “who was here first” have irked me from an early age, as I could not see sense in them (there were other people here before, in between and after) and I thought they simply prolonged the conflict. You may find it presumptuous to say such things while being on the side which was the one to grab new land with that excuse, but I did not have much say in the matter.