Indigeneity Between Genealogy and Power

Adam Louis-Klein

The concept of “indigeneity” has become politically charged and analytically unstable. It often collapses two distinct meanings into one:

First, indigeneity as genealogy—the association of a people with a specific land through origin traditions, language, ancestry, and continuous civilizational presence.

Second, indigeneity as dispossession—a political status defined by being conquered, colonized, or marginalized, especially by external imperial powers.

In the settler-colonial contexts of the modern West—like the Americas or Australia—these two meanings overlap. The colonized were also the ancestral peoples. As a result, “indigeneity” comes to imply both firstness and oppression—producing a powerful rhetoric of double moral legitimacy: the right of original belonging fused with the moral capital of the victim.

But this fusion breaks down in other regions—especially the Middle East. Arab-Muslim empires expanded far beyond Arabia, displacing or absorbing pre-existing peoples: Jews, Copts, Arameans, Assyrians, Berbers, Persians, and others. In these contexts, Arab Muslims are not genealogically indigenous to the lands they now dominate. Their presence originates in historical conquest.

While Arab-Muslim identity may be globally subordinate relative to Western power, it remains regionally hegemonic. Across much of the Middle East and North Africa, Arabization and Islamization have rendered other peoples marginalized minorities within their own ancestral lands. Yet in global discourse, this regional dominance is often ignored, and Arab identity is conflated with indigeneity by default.

This conflation is central to the discourse around Israel. Zionism is frequently framed as European colonialism—erasing the fact that it was a civilizational return movement, not an imperial project. Jews are cast as foreign settlers, and Arab Muslims as the indigenous victims. But this framing only works by collapsing the distinction between genealogy and power—by treating Jews as inauthentic because they now have a state, and treating Arabs as indigenous even in lands they conquered.

This rhetorical inversion is now one of the central engines of contemporary antisemitism. It denies Jewish peoplehood, erases Jewish continuity, and reframes return as invasion.

We may be at the point where more formal and public articulations of Jewish indigeneity are necessary—not to replicate the identity politics of others, but to resist a new form of narrative erasure. Jewish continuity, descent, language, law, memory, and land are not abstractions. They form a civilizational structure tied to a specific geography. If “indigenous” means anything in this world of contested belonging, Jews must be recognized among its clearest examples.

Adam Louis-Klein is a writer, anthropologist, and musician, currently completing a PhD in Anthropology at McGill University. His work explores Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, and contemporary antisemitism, drawing connections between civilizational identity, recursive ethnography, and the politics of indigeneity.