Indigeneity Is Silly
You can just treat humans humanely
1. Is This An Indigenous?
One of my favorite people on Substack is
. He’s exceptionally talented at achieving moral clarity—not in the sense that demagogues talk about it, but actual moral philosophical disambiguity.He even has a handy manual to show you how to do it yourself:
If you’re wondering whether water is wet or if the chicken came before the egg, Silas has got you covered.
I’m wondering what the hell ‘indigeneity’ is. Because it sure seems like a Stupid Word Game to me.
I’ve been wondering for a while, actually, and it’s hard to get a clear answer. In fact, even the Wikipedia page admits, “There is no generally accepted definition of Indigenous peoples.”
And yet indigenous rights activists love to make sweeping claims about how indigenous people should be treated in a just society. The UN, for example, declared in 2007 that not only must they enjoy “human rights and fundamental freedoms,” but also the right to “distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions,” and even a “right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.”
In essence, indigenous peoples—unlike most other social categories—should be allowed to defy state authority, and also get squatters’ rights. Seems pretty important who, exactly, counts as indigenous then!
So what are some candidate definitions?
Indigenous people are a people from a place. This is the most intuitive understanding of indigeneity. Of course, it’s pretty silly on its face—go back long enough and we’re all from the same place. But genetic clusters really do exist, and this definition probably reduces to “Indigenous people are an ethnicity from a place.”
The indigenous peoples of Central and Eastern Europe (source) Of course, even this rewording has some silly implications—most glaringly, we’re all indigenous to somewhere! In fact, we’re all indigenous to lots of somewheres. For example, my mom and dad are both Jews from Eastern Europe—that means we’ve got a lot of Polish ancestry, and a lot of Russian, and plenty of Semitic. So are we indigenous to Israel? Or to Minsk? Does that entitle us to the land? Does it entitle us less than it would an uber-Mediterranean Mizrahi Jew or a purebred blonde Belarusian?
If indigenous self-determination was truly a fundamental necessity for justice, this definition would demand a radical reshuffling of the global order to form a million genotypically-accurate ethnostates. No, clearly we need some other view. One that entitles the Utes to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation (and its not insignificant oil and gas deposits), but not me to Minsk.
Indigenous people are people from a place, but only if other people then came to that place and oppressed them. This oughta work, right? After all, I’m white, and whites are oppressors, so there’s no way I could be entitled to any part of the old Russian empire, that great haven for my people!
“Feast After the Pogrom” (source) Oh, right. Lots and lots of peoples have been oppressed, at one time or another. You’d still have to find some way to convince Lukashenko I have a right to live in Minsk.
There’s a more fundamental problem with this view, though. The idea is that victimization creates a moral right all on its own—there’s no other reason I should live in Minsk, I simply deserve to. Now, I happen to think that moral desert is doomed in general, but you don’t even have to go that far to reject this idea. Whatever land I indigenously “deserve” probably belongs to someone else now—is it really just for him to lose his house simply because my ancestors experienced injustice at the hands of someone else? Of course not! Even if I deserve the land, he doesn’t deserve to be dispossessed of it.
So is there a view which preserves moral consideration for everyone involved?
Indigenous people are people from a place, but only if other people then came to that place and oppressed them, and also are continuing to oppress them. Ok. This is gerrymandered to the point that it’s unclear why the first clause—the intuitively “indigenous” part of things—is necessary anymore. Why not just grant the special rights to anyone under active oppression? But fine, let’s roll with it.
We need a distinct ethnic group who are actively being subjugated on their own native territory by another distinct ethnic group. I’m not in Minsk, and there hasn’t even been a pogrom since November, so no problems there.
Does this kind of indigenous population exist? If they do, do they deserve the rights that the UN has declared for them?
2. Probably Not In Latin America
I’ve written before about how much I hate my Spanish class.
What I didn’t mention there is that we spent a solid few months this year on a unit called La diversidad en el mundo hispano. The diversity of the Spanish-speaking world.
Exactly three diversities, actually: afrolatinos, personas indígenas, and los romaníes.1
And, of course, our learning centered largely around how terribly marginalized and oppressed all of these communities have always been.2
As it turns out, something like 60% of Latin America is mixed race. And, so far as I can tell, that number comes from census data, which is mostly self-identified.
On a genetic basis, no, Chile is not 52% white. In 2002, the country was 72% mixed race. Since then, most of its immigrants have come from Venezuela and Peru—63% and 64% mixed, respectively—and genetic mixing only ever increases over time.
The discrepancy probably comes from lighter-skinned mixed Chileans wanting to classify themselves as purely white—possibly hoping to distance themselves from the loonies burning churches down.
In any case, my point is this: it’s unclear who, exactly, gets to count as indigenous in Latin America! Years of miscegenation have muddied the waters to the point that you can either a) grant indigenous rights to the vast majority of your citizens, which mostly amounts to discriminating against recent immigrants, or b) grant them to anyone who self-ids as indigenous, which creates an obvious incentive for everyone to claim indigenous ancestry until you regress to situation (a).
The broader point is that when your society is mostly multicultural and mostly unopposed to race-mixing for decades on end, it’s extremely hard to defend the idea that any given ethnicity is a minority being oppressed by a big bad majority.
In Chile, the Mapuche still claim to be oppressed. But since the founding of the state, the majority of Hispanic Chileans have considered the Mapuche to be full citizens of the state, and these days, even among old, poor, and uneducated Chileans, it’s a minority that holds discriminatory views toward them.
My guess is that most of what the Mapuche call “oppression” is a fairly understandable response to the terrorism their political leaders are engaged in.
How do they justify that terrorism?
Under the guise of indigenous rights!
Why do they deserve those indigenous rights?
Because they’re being oppressed!
Why are they being oppressed?
…You get the idea.
Indigenous liberation in mixed-up societies is circularly justified nonsense.
3. What About the Good Ol’ US and A?
Here, indigenous populations are a lot more genetically distinct. Some mixing has gone on, but still 3 million Americans belong to a tribe and report no other racial identity.
Then again, 3 million is… less than 1% of the American population.
Sure, they’re a 1% that really does suffer, to some degree—their median household income is the second-lowest among US ethnic groups. But first-lowest is black Americans—of whom there are 41 million, or 12% of the US population.
Of course, since black people aren’t from here, they don’t deserve the rights the indigenous do. Duh.
We definitely give indigenous Americans a good bit of what they deserve, according to the UN: reservations run their own “political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions” and, though many aren’t situated on their ancestral lands, they do control a bit more than 2% of all the land in the US.
Does this make indigenous Americans any better off?
Well, here’s an unfortunate outcome of reservations running their own educational systems:
This is the issue with such a silly desert-based framework for indigenous rights—do indigenous people have a right to ancestral land, or do they have a right to living good lives? Do they have a right to their own institutions, or to effective and functional institutions?
Nothing about indigeneity-informed politics is humanitarian.
At best, you’re in the territory of woke axiology—and at worst, you’re taking an already-disadvantaged group, separating them from everyone else, taking effective social and legal and economic institutions away, and telling them to figure it out. Bad!
Clearly, the better solution is not caring. Everyone gets welfare, everyone gets market access, and we all learn to live with each other. No firebombing churches, and no casinos either. Just decency and coexistence.
The supposedly-outdated term is los gitanos.
In theory, we also learned some Spanish at some point, though I don’t really recall that going on much.
I mostly agree with your post. That said I would like to sound two notes of caution. I think given the frequent history of forced assimilation and persecution in many societies, in at least a few countries such rights can serve as useful safeguards against such things, although obviously in a lot of countries like the United States, this isn’t a realistic concern. Also, as somebody else noted, complicating the picture is the fact that often a lot of the people who receive such rights genuinely do seem to want them which could be because of foolish ethnic sentiments. But we should probably give at least a little wait to these desires, even if not as much weight as we give their other preferences, and this preference for self-governance might be an indication in some cases that there are important considerations that we are missing because of seeing like a state reasons, and these people might genuinely be better off in some way. Also in some societies, people care about the issue so much that interfering with such rights is going to lead to blood in the streets. Although obviously that’s not a concern in America.
> if anything, made much worse off by their isolation from liberal, multicultural, mainstream American society.
My understanding is that lots of indigenous people and indigenous rights groups think they're better off by other metrics, ones they care about more. For instance, they might care about sovereignty, or not having mainstream American culture competing with traditional indigenous culture. For some people, it might even be about the literal geographical location - they've designated some sites as sacred to indigenous people, and want unfettered access to them. (This is why there was so much fracas over oil companies wanting to run a pipeline through the land.) And it seems like lots of indigenous people genuinely value these things over higher SAT scores, or the other benefits of mainstream American society. Isn't there a sense in which we should let them decide what they want? We let people smoke because we think it's OK for people to choose to trade health for pleasure. Why not let people trade education (or whatever) for, say, a sense of sovereignty?