Socialism . . . Seriously by Katch Danny;

Author:Katch, Danny;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Living with the Land

There are various attempts to limit or expand what it means to be Indigenous for one cynical reason or another. At one end is the long history of US government refusals to recognize individuals and entire nations as Indigenous. At the other is the absurd claim of some Israelis that their occupation of Palestinian land isn’t really an occupation because according to the Bible all Jews are indigenous to the region.

Most Indigenous peoples don’t define themselves by DNA testing or even by having lived somewhere for a long time. Instead, Indigeneity is often understood through a people’s distinct “place-based” history and culture. Here’s how Gilio-Whitaker puts it:

The very thing that distinguishes Indigenous people from settler societies is their unbroken connection to ancestral homelands. Their cultures and identities are linked to their original places in ways that define them: they are reflected in language, place names, and cosmology (origin stories). In Indigenous worldviews, there is no separation between people and land, people and other life forms, people and their ancient ancestors whose bones are infused in the land and whose spirits permeate place.

The brutalities of conquest and capitalism have painfully wrenched many Native peoples away from these ancestral homelands to distant reservations or cities. Native American reservations today cover just 2 percent of the Indigenous land that makes up the United States. And yet through centuries of dogged resistance, many Indigenous people have maintained physical and cultural connections to their original lands and built relationships with their new ones. In a famous 1977 speech to a Canadian government committee looking to build an oil pipeline through his people’s territory, Dene leader Phillip Blake gave a generous and inspiring vision of what Indigenous leadership has to offer the world:

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