It’s still being worked out by indigenous scholars. For example, one line of reasoning holds that Europeans are not indigenous to Europe but instead killed all of the people that were indigenous there, like the druids of Ireland and the various pagan groups. They are also working out the concept of indigenizing as a way of understanding indigeneity. Because if the theories of human migration are correct, then most indigenous groups migrated to where they are (or were in cases where they were genocides and displaced). The concept of indigenizing has to do with living as a part of the land instead of on the land. “The land” here stands for the complex ecosystem(s) that participate in the location being discussed. Living with the land entails a form of participatory stewardship at all levels of human existence: physical, narrative, spiritual, medical, emotional, intellectual, constructive, destructive, conservationist, adaptive, etc.

In this case, whether it was the nation of Israelites or the people of Palestine who were there first, the conjecture is that the Palestinians had become indigenous to the land by living with it and not merely on it. The further conjecture is that those of Jewish faith were allowed to integrate with that culture and become indigenous to that land through participatory stewardship, which is supported by the evidence of Arab of Jewish faith living among the Palestinians even before the Balfour declaration.

It was the Balfour declaration that brought colonialism to the region and through contrast created this concept of Palestinian indigeneity. Prior to colonization, the concept of indigeniety didn’t exist, and some indigenous people refuse the term because they hold that indigenous is the default and everyone else is colonizing and that labelling should be for the colonizer and not to colonized.

That being said, the situation in Palestine is fraught, and I would not select myself as the most qualified to assess the situation. In this way, I tail the radical Marxist American Indian line, which is that Palestinians are indigenous. I am open to evidence otherwise, but I trust the indigenous people living under America to analyze the situation and apply the term, so I tail them.

It has an international law definition under ILO Convention 169

I wouldn’t reckon myself indigenous, so take this with a grain of salt and maybe do your own research later, but… The most boring and obtuse but also accurate definition of an indigenous person by my understanding is basically just “thon is the counterpart to the settler in a settler-colonial dynamic”, where settler-colonialism is basically the form of colonialism that seeks to eradicate or assimilate natives rather than to simply exploit the locals.

I find that trying to define “indigenous” any more concretely than “settler’s counterpart”, either as “the first people in an area” or as “the people who have continuously inhabited an area the longest” or even as “those who live with the land as stewards”, is sort of essentialist and non-dialectical. These definitions will tend to include groups we want to exclude and exclude groups we want to include, and many of these definitions end up framing indigeneity as a “property dispute”. Trying to define indigeneity by strict criteria ends up making the intended referents continually need to prove that they really do fit in the box, e.g. Sámi people find claims to their indigeneity questioned so as to imply that they’re actually demanding “more rights than their due”; while the intended non-referents of indigeneity will continually try to prove that they really do fit in the box after all, e.g. white “Rhodesians” claimed that Great Zimbabwe was built by Europeans, and attempted to suppress any research that challenged this notion, in order to claim that they were the “real” natives of Zimbabwe. In the worst cases these types of essentialist definitions of indigeneity end up justifying anti-immigrant xenophobia, as conflating locals with natives in turn ends up conflating immigrants with settlers.

When Europeans reached the shores of Turtle Island, it was the natives who taught them about the land and its flora and fauna, and who helped them survive in such an unfamiliar territory. It was the natives who were used as slaves or as cheap labor for resource extraction in early cross-Atlantic trade. It was the natives whose internal conflicts were exploited by Europeans to gain a foothold. And it was natives who then found themselves relegated to the lower class of the settler-colonial dynamic, killed and displaced and assimilated as their land was seen as something to be owned and exploited. And among the settlers were of course not just wealthy bourgeoisie, but in fact included many poor proletarians who would be given the spoils of conquest in order to pacify any revolutionary sentiment, and whose labor would then serve to build and maintain this system. And for other indigenous peoples we see similar rhymes to these types of stories.

If anybody who actually is indigenous has anything to add or correct, please do. But in any case Freddie DeBoer is very wrong to treat “indigenous” as purely a word to pull at the heartstrings and provide a moral basis for Native American rights — “indigenous” is genuinely a useful term when describing a specific type of dynamic between two groups. For Freddie DeBoer to argue against labeling groups as indigenous because “the concepts of democratic rule, human rights, egalitarianism, and international law must be enough”, ignores the fact that labels are incredibly useful in actually understanding the material conditions that we need to work with in order to actually achieve democracy, equality, and human rights for all.

He’s an unread post-leftist who constantly whines about woke in his shitty substack that’s really just a glorified diary; an epic fail child of an academic; a chronic Reddit poster and red scare fan; and annoying.