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.
Incongruous and Ill-Conceived: Israel as Settler Colonialism
The settler colonialism paradigm, when applied to Israel, becomes absurd indeed. Jews are Indigenous to the land of Israel, with a continuous presence spanning over three millennia. That is a far cry from the experience of other so-called settler colonial states, which involved strangers laying claim to foreign territories. Rather than being driven by a metropole or mother country, the return of Russian and East European Jews to their ancestral land in the nineteenth century was largely in response to the persecution and antisemitism experienced in those nations.
Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity and Activist Purity Laws
Another stream of the political lineage Ngata espouses has a dominant Marxist foundation. It looks to the likes of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and PLO leader Yasser Arafat, two men responsible for the murder of thousands.
Linguistic imperialism: Rhetoric versus reality
One of the more obvious examples of the disconnect between rhetoric and reality is in the area of language loss, a matter of deep concern to Indigenous cultures worldwide.