honestly a lotta North American Native folks id’ing as Indigenous / using Indigeneity as a framework is like using a pressure washer instead of a watering can to water your plants

yeah it’s water but it’s not the right tool for the job

there’s about 600 Native nations in the U.S. which is already a mind-bending complexity of experience to include under a shared political project: Indigeneity is a global political project—spanning continents, races, nations, religions—that is several magnitudes more complex

a lot of us use Indig simply out of convenience to refer to Native nations Indigenous to what is currently the U.S. & Canada but that ultimately weakens Indigeneity as a political project and is inappropriate particularly because such usage implicitly excludes Black communities

Blackness as a racial construct is created + maintained by White settlers to disrupt and sever certain African communities from their Indig land and the ongoing expression means Blackness and Black people are always Indigenous just like any Native person is also always Indigenous

“Black and Indigenous” doesn’t necessarily exclude Black people from Indigeneity as it can mean “Black [ppl who are Indig] and Indigenous [ppl more broadly to incl. non-Black]” but you’re kidding yourself if you think that’s how it actually operates in our anti-Black environment

not to mention using Indig unqualified / unspecified opens up all kinds of access to your shared experience you don’t need or want: the Sami are white Europeans, how many times when you use Indig as a label / movement do you really want to incl. white Europeans in things?

Sami have as much claim in Indigeneity of course, but when discussing the political movement of communities Indig to the Americas a lot of the time we DO want to exclude other Indig communities elsewhere bc our experiences and histories are too different

we tend to throw around Indig freely saying being Indig is like this or Indigeneity is like that, and that’s how Indigeneity is expressed for us, but just consider that other Indig communities globally might chafe under the carelessness of our usage and applications of Indig

Indigeneity in the Americas always refers to both Black and Native communities, and when we want to talk about just Native communities here we can just say… Native

in colloquial English speech everyone’s gonna understand what we’re talking about

and in formal situations we can qualifiy Indigeneity to acheive the specificity we need

the point of this isn’t to police every usage of Indig, but to say the pure scale of complexity and diversity in Indigeneity as a political project is mind-bending, and every time we use Indig we invite that complexity in

a lot of the time when discussing the Native experience in North America something more limited in scope than an “Indigenous” that’s unqualified and unrestricted is actually more effective and appropriate