The Original & The Conquered: The Invention of Indigenous Politics
“If people can’t acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous cultures, then that’s their loss.” —Jay Griffiths
The above quote is a standard bromide, a piece of Gaian folklore that we’ve come to know all too well. From Avatar to Pocahantas, the idea that indigenous people are a breed apart and somehow bestowed with an additional wisdom that civilization has lost is deeply rooted in 1960s counterculture. That indigenous people have some special claim to their land, over and above any other group, is so entrenched that some on the right have begun using the term “indigenous Europeans” in an effort to legitimise the ownership of their countries in the face of mass migration.
I want to show that indigenous is not a neutral word, and has in fact been developed specifically to exclude Europeans and undermine the sovereignty of the Westphalian nation state. The reality of human history is that all nations and civilizations are a complicated mixture of the original and the conquered peoples from many times and many places. Indigeneity runs counter to this, trying to freeze in place a moment, a particular ethnic group, and to claim purity of descent, forever associating them with one territory.
I argue this is a poor strategy, and that we should instead be asserting that our nations and identities are legitimate precisely because our ancestors conquered, fought, and died for the land, not because we are mythically indigenous to it. I hope to show exactly how and why the politics of indigeneity were developed with legalistic transnational oversight, how conquest has been removed from international politics, and why we shouldn’t fall into this rhetorical trap.
The Definition
The term indigenous is hardly new, even within political discussion, and was developed in the 17th century from a mixture of Latin and English terms to refer to anything which is born from a certain place, in particular plants and animals.
The Theatrum Botanicum.
Its earliest use might be in the 1640 compendium on herbs and plants, the Theatrum Botanicum, by John Parkinson. The need for the word arose as Europeans began to encounter New World peoples who didn’t previously belong to the purview of Christendom, the Islamic world, or related civilizations known to the ancients. Tribes such as the Wampanoag and the Nauset were entirely novel to the early colonists—they belonged to a history and way of life which seemed separate from even the most archaic Biblical descriptions. Thus “indigenous” seemed to capture the spirit of these tribes who belonged more to the earth, rooted in place, than the wandering restless Europeans.
Legally this term has led to all manner of thorny and difficult problems. Many nation-states have their own definitions of the term. The United Nations, World Bank and the International Labour Organization also have their own legal understandings of indigenous. These aren’t merely an academic exercise, but reflect a wielding of power with effects on billions of people. Just as a small example—the Brazilian state has allowed its indigenous tribes to have “permanent possession” of the territories they “traditionally occupy.” This amounts in practice to a huge 13% of the country’s landmass for just 0.4% of its population. Whether or not this is a good thing, it's a reminder of how material reality is affected by these legal categories and definitions.
The commonalities to these definitions of indigenous include: a group of people who lived in a territory before the occupation of a colonial power; their separation from the main bulk of the population, both culturally and politically; people who have an ethnic and territorial distinction from the dominant social power and a lack of political power at the state level. Prior to all understanding of indigenous, and the main action upon which it rests, is the act of colonization. Indigenous legal scholars and tradition almost exclusively focus on “Western” colonization, broadly meaning the contact and settlement period between 1492 and the mid-20th century. Legal expert S.J Anaya opens a paper on the subject with:
“Half a millennia ago the peoples indigenous to the continents now called North and South America began to experience change…Europeans arrived and began to lay claim to their lands, frequently slaughtering the native children, women and men who stood in the way. For many of those who survived, the Europeans brought disease and slavery.”
In a similar vein, indigenous legal scholar Robert Williams describes the colonial mindset as: “The West’s religion, civilization, and knowledge are superior to the religions, civilizations, and knowledge of non-Western peoples.” What should be obvious then, to the tradition of indigenous law, is the exclusive and total equation of colonialism with western colonialism. This leaves open and unexplored the question of how indigenous law impacts upon ethnic minorities within the historical purview of China, Japan, and the Ottoman and Russian Empires, to name just a few. It also creates a historical severance at the point of European contact with the Americas at the dawn of the 16th century. Conveniently this misses out the surviving Khanates, the Mugal, Ming, Safavid and Ottoman Empires, as well as the kaleidoscope of African kingdoms. Each of these was violent, expansionist and dominating, each in its own way, but they are all discounted from the legal framework of indigeneity.
While Russia, Iran and China today have their own internal legal relationships to minority ethnic groups, the term indigenous is often not applied and in some cases actively rejected by the state. China denied the existence of any indigenous groups until the 1980s, and even now, considers them to be ethnic groups rather than indigenous per se. In many ways this makes more logical sense—despite the international community viewing Tibetans as an oppressed, enlightened people, it didn’t fit the narrative to remember that Tibet was once an empire itself. Even more ridiculous examples, the Manchu and the Mongols, could obviously be ethnic minorities, but given their histories of political dominance over China, should never be categorized as indigenous.
The Mongols besieging Baghdad in 1258.
Ronald Niezen, in his 2003 book, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity, remarks on the historical oddity of an entire political category of people being effectively created out of thin air by some diplomats and NGO workers in a room at the United Nations. These elites somehow bypassed their usual distaste for ethnicity and ethnonationalism, and an entirely new class of people was immediately tied into a vision of ecological harmony and “wildness,” drawing on an imperial tradition that requires anthropologists to determine the exact nature and type of each indigenous community.
In many ways at the root there was, and still is, the need for legitimate indigeneity to be exotic, unfamiliar and marginal—an ironically racist position to take. People with strange colorful clothes who live in remote and dangerous parts of the world. On the scale of human groups, ethnic minorities could no longer cut it, since they could be assimilated and become part of the dominant power structure. It has become crucial for the definition of indigenous that these people remain powerless and dependent on a technocratic body like the UN to arbitrate and mediate on their behalf. A country like China, which asserts its sovereignty over all its territory, would rightly see any claim that the Tibetans were indigenous as an enormous challenge, since it opens the door to a flurry of international legal disputes, with the UN standing between the State and the Indigenous.
The Problem
Having looked at the origins of the term and how its use has been framed legally, it becomes clear that the foundational principles include several legal sleight of hands to attempt to create a legal “indigenous person.” These include: the claim that there is a neat division between colonised and coloniser; the claim that indigenous personhood is an a priori category, but also framed by its relationship to the State and the power of the State; the dismissal of violence and land acquisition committed by indigenous people to other indigenous peoples during the colonization period and the delegitimization of particular historical episodes of conquest.
The period of Western expansion and colonialism, particularly from England, Spain, France, Holland and Portugal, is considered within the definition of indigenous to be the defining moment when indigeneity was created. The exceptionalism of these centuries is not to be underestimated, from the millions of deaths from disease, to the unprecedented creation of huge new states such as Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil and Australia.
This particular burst of colonial expansion is a defining moment in human history. However, almost all peoples have engaged in similar actions, at a variety of scales, towards their neighbours. The Thule Eskimo population utterly annihilated the previous Dorset people who were living in the Arctic north. The Bantu Expansion out of northern Cameroon devastated the Khoisan and Pygmy peoples. When English colonists arrived in North America, they found a continent rich in cultural diversity, but also endemic warfare, with every tribe settled into alliances for defense and a highly developed warrior culture, complete with siege weapons and defensive fortresses. Larger acts of colonization include the early Islamic conquests, the Roman, Greek and Persian imperial ventures, and Han Chinese expansion.
[I Ate Raw Beef From Six Different Cultures]
To delineate European colonialism is appropriate, given the scale of global transformation, but it shouldn’t provide cover for the commonplace and standard reality of warfare and conquest which every people and civilization has engaged in. What has been legally created here is a category of colonization, above which is immoral, but below which is de facto acceptable. Crucially, the particular race of the people involved informs whether it is legitimate or not.
Thus indigenous as a category exists in an ontology of the world where Europeans are colonizers and everyone else is colonized, which is why the gatekeepers of international law will never allow Europeans to claim indigeneity. It’s also why strange descriptions occur such as the Sámi being designated as indigenous (non-agricultural, exotic, non-Caucasion), but the Scandinavians are seen as colonizers and cannot be called indigenous, despite this population being in the territory for longer. The case of the Sámi demonstrates exactly how the legal claim to indigenous works—although they arrived in Scandinavia much later than the dominant population, they engage in subsistence herding, maintain their own language and culture, and do not control the machinery of government, therefore they qualify as indigenous.
The “indigenous” Sámi people.
It should be clear then, that anyone who looks to resist mass migration and multicultural social transformation by invoking indigenous status is falling into a trap. Europeans will never be indigenous. The very definition of indigenous requires a minority to be excluded and dispossessed by the state, to have their collective rights mediated by large, unaccountable international bodies, and to cede sovereignty over their territory. This is a disaster for any historical conception of ethnic identity.
For centuries, political control over an area by the state has been synonymous with the power of a majority group to enforce their will. Retreating into a position of indigenous reimagines the state as a foreign entity, one which is in charge of our lives and is outside of indigenous power. For the English to state that they are indigenous is to immediately reimagine Parliament, the Crown, and all the constitutional bodies of authority as no longer theirs, or no longer in their domain. Many English may legitimately feel like this, but it’s not a position of strength. It requires outside authorities to recognize the claim; it reduces the right of the English to rule their own debate over how, when, and where the English emerged and took control of the country.
This is not power—to allow academics to deny your right to rule a territory based on claims of legitimate indigeneity. The same goes for all countries. The dominant groups rule their countries on the basis of centuries of warfare and bloodshed, and this shouldn’t be swept aside in favour of competing claims in genetics journals. A life under the status of indigenous is a life where the right to your land is defended and enforced by someone else. The position that should be advocated is to reclaim the legitimacy of conquest.
The Right of Conquest
The Right of Conquest is both a philosophical and legal principle. To successfully wage war, invade another’s territory, and defeat him militarily should entitle the victor to rule over his territory and deal with its contents as desired. This ancient law, reflected in the history of European warfare and colonialism, has been denied since 1945. The Nuremberg Principles, drawn up by the International Law Commission of the United Nations after World War II, lay out what constitutes a war crime. Among these, Principle VI, the prosecuting of any aggressive war as a “crime against peace,” effectively abolishes the right to invade a country and take possession of its land. This is a shock to many people unfamiliar with international law, since there have obviously been many wars since WWII, but nevertheless, the legal principle of claiming territory that you have invaded is no longer recognized by the “international community.”
To the victor go the spoils.
While this is the legal principle, which is a crucial part of the postwar liberal order, the moral principle of warfare can be argued for and is still valid. “Woe to the conquered” has never stopped being true. If someone has the power and force of arms to take something, then their right to the prize can be basically accepted as fair. Obviously this has always been subject to certain rules, traditions, conventions, and customs. Total anarchy is not desirable and philosophies of casus belli have been developed to create a framework in which war has a legitimate place. The claim can also be extended back into the past to defend an ancestral claim to territory; this is usually heretical in the modern world, except when considering decolonization or indigenous land. Irredentism is a banned idea for the majority of nations—a few spots like Northern Ireland remain politically legitimate to fight over, but Greek, Turkish or North Korean expansionary visions are highly taboo within the official international community. But countries around the world don't need to claim further territory in an era when government, media and academic figures actively push the idea that their history makes them illegitimate polities anyway, or that their states are not how they imagined them to be. It is enough for the moment to declare ancestral conquest of territory as de facto legitimate in its own right, not because the UN has “consented” to their existence.
We should be critical of the postwar vision of a world that is essentially unidirectional. No great increases in territory, no conquests, no confrontations of opposing claims, just a series of frozen borders policed by the United States’ military that can only ever fragment. Since WW2 the number of independent nations has tripled, with very few being occupied or absorbed. The trend has been towards disintegration and secession. You might argue that this is good and localist and challenges the globalist ideology, but in reality small nations have less influence and ability to project power outwards. They become client states of the American empire in a corporate landscape, losing their best and brightest across the open borders to the West and unable to field their own military forces without US aid.
[An Interview With Alexander Dugin, the "World's Most Dangerous Philosopher"]
This is why China will not relinquish territory, despite claims to indigeneity or autonomy. They recognise that a large strong state is the only way to maintain sovereignty. The state should be a broad church, able to represent all ethnic and minority identities, much as an empire manages different populations. Reducing politics downwards to a series of ethnic conflicts over who is indigenous or not does little to help build and maintain sovereign power. Great Britain was at its strongest when all the nations were pulled together and directed outwards, rather than devolving into petty group politics. The right of conquest is the foundational law of international relations, regardless of what UN lawyers might argue. Strong nations are founded by conquerors and can go on to conquer in the future. This isn’t a case for endless war, but it is a demand that a sovereign state retains the right to go to war without lawyers deciding for them.
Conclusion
Hopefully I’ve been able to lay out a clear argument for why indigenous rhetoric and politics is not a sound strategy for a majority population to fall back on. Indigenous law and its history as a novel and unusual form of politics was designed from the beginning to be against the interest of large European nations, particularly those with a history of overseas colonialism. Its insistence on UN mediation, definitional powerlessness, and exclusion from the mainstream of any social system may be appropriate for a tribe with several hundred members, but it cannot work for a European population counted in the tens of millions.
Instead, despite the mass migration and demographic challenge, we should insist on the legitimacy of historical conquest and the right to rule as a sovereign people, without legalistic maternal oversight. The actions of the Rus, the Saxons, the Normans, the Bulgars and the Mongols, to name but a few, have been the destructively creative force which has shaped our world. States expand and collapse, ethnicities form and dissolve, alliances are made and broken. This is the norm for world history and the ossified nature of modern life is a product of both commercial and military globalization. The American aegis has made us complacent and unable to imagine governing ourselves in our own interests. Once this starts to slip, as it currently is, there will be space for the equilibrium to be tipped.
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