There’s a lot of discourse these days that completely collapses Indigeneity into a Native American/USA framework and also erases the visceral terror that Indigenous Peoples experience worldwide defending homelands against corporations, nation states. To erase this is violence.
Indigenous people represent roughly 5% of global population, occupy about 25% of land on earth, protect 80% of global biodiversity. Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous land/water/climate defenders are fighting to protect the planet. This work is radical, dangerous, and persecuted.
So important not to lose this in conversations that deny the existence of Indigenous peoples, which collapse Indigenous peoples into frameworks that deny the structural, ideological realities through which ongoing genocide against Indigenous peoples is happening.
Indigenous peoples must also contend with how and when Indigenous peoples are weaponized against other oppressed groups. In the collision of plural genocides, Indigenous peoples must take accountability for harms against others.
There are roughly 370-476 million Indigenous people on earth. This is a fluid, complex collective of people asserting plural ontologies in the face of domination by colonial, white supremacist, imperial powers. To collapse this to a single narrative is to erase plural experiences
But just remember: Indigenous peoples — in dynamic, plural, shifting ways across plural continents — are asserting onto-epistemologies that pre-date, refract, disrupt, refuse, diffuse, implode, transform and confound universalism, empire, capital, white supremacy, extraction.
Whether academe understands this or not is irrelevant. Indigenous people will keep protecting lands/waters/atmospheres/relations because that is what is demanded in relational cosmologies. And western academe, at its root, is anti-thetical to relationality/reciprocity/humility.
Key to all this is simply refusing the categories of Indigeneity imposed by white supremacy/white anthropology. Acknowledging the self-determination of plural Indigenous cosmologies. Working in pluralities — which includes the possibilities of plural simultaneous existences.
Indigeneity is not wholly a racial category or wholly an onto-epistemic category. It exists simultaneously across these (quantum) and, for far too long, has been controlled through the logics of the ‘white possessive’ (see: Moreton-Robinson). First step: fire the Indian agents.
Anyway. Indigenous land defenders are being murdered, incarcerated for protecting lands/waters/atmospheres/relations. And that this violence is at the rupture of plural Indigenous onto-epistemologies/cosmologies with universalism, white supremacy, empire, capital, extraction.
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