Indigeneity Between Genealogy and Power

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.