Evolving thoughts.

I read @DavidTreuer 's fine book Heartbeat of Wounded Knee and in it he gives a broad history of the original peoples of NA. He traces various groups migrating, coalescing, and emerging as peoples.

Rather like we understand the history of Europe.

The people we now know as the French haven't been French for thousands of years. They were Gauls and Celts and idk. It's been a while so I forget. My point is that through migration, conflict, and coalescing they eventually emerged as how we understand them now. French.

It actually surprised me to see similar patterns here. I don't know why that should have been surprising except that western thought has always fixed us in some immovable past and we've somehow absorbed that. This idea that we have always been Anishnaabe in this particular way

Of course our ancestors reach back thousands of years. With language and cultural artifacts that remain part of our current cosmology. But that's true of the French and British too.

The British haven't always existed as they do today but their contemporary legal practices have roots over a thousand years old. We don't speak the same English that Chaucer did, but there's similarities. You can see where modern English started to come together.

Anishnaabemowin has evolved too. We've lost words. We've gained words. We didn't record things the way Europeans did so we can't grab a snapshot of the language from 600 years ago but I imagine we'd see something similar.

Yet we see Indigenous as something untouched by colonization. As something that existed in a pure, static state for thousands of years before colonization ruined everything.

Which it did. I'm certainly not debating that.

What if we started seeing Anishnaabe as an identity similar to French or British or Spanish. A political, rather than strictly racial or ethnic, identity. One with its own cultural language, a shared worldview but fundamentally political body.

The various European identities also emerged as people over time in particular geographies. As did African peoples, Asian, etc. With various ways of understanding their relationship to the land and the world around them.

I'm questioning what we mean when we say Indigenous. How we decide who Indigenous people are globally. How we emerged as people, how those identities are continuing to emerge and evolve.

What are we building.