It Could Happen Here - Indigeneity with Andrew

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Andrew is joined by Mia to discuss different conceptions of indigeneity and what they mean politically.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. This is Amy Roboc alongside T.J. Holmes from the Amy and T.J. podcast. And there is so much news, information, commentary coming at you all day and from all over the place. What's fact? What's fake? And sometimes what the F. So let's cut the crap, okay? Follow the Amy and T.J podcast, a one-stop news and pop culture shop to get you caught up and on with your day. And listen to Amy and T.J. on the IHeart.

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast, Eating While Broke, is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future. This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre, as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up. There's an economic component to communities thriving. If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail. Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John Hobriant, I sit down with Tiffany the budgetista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money. What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here? We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset, shifts too many of us were never, ever taught. If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more. Listen to Money and Wealth with John Hope Bryant from the Black Effect Network on the I'd Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down. Georgia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. and Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues. On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King,

recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T, everybody's talking about. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All Zone Media. The National Geographic's Encyclopedia says that indigenous refers to people or objects that are native to a certain region or environment, whether they grow there, live there, are produced there or occur naturally there.

When it comes to flora and fauna, they are considered indigenous to an ecosystem when they haven't been introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation. Over millions of years, these living things have become well suited to their own. habitats, carefully adapted to the region's soil, climate, and food web. However, when it comes to people, there can be some confusion about what it means to be indigenous, especially when it comes to questions of land rights, autonomy, and reparations. Most people understand that Native American nations and Aboriginal Australians are indigenous. But some might then ask, well, if indigenous means originating from a place, then aren't all homo sapiens indigenous to Africa? Why should one group's claim of

indigianity take precedence over any other? This may be asked in more or less good faith. And so others may ask the question, well, if a group occupies a region for several generations, does that then make them indigenous? Are white Americans, indigenous? And so others may ask the question, well, if a group occupies a region for several generations, indigenous of their family has been there since the founding of the United States? Are French people indigenous to France? And if so, does that somehow justify their xenophobia toward refugees in some weird reactionary corruption of decolonial rhetoric? Speaking of corruptions of decolonial rhetoric, some Zionists claim that Jewish people as a whole are indigenous to Palestine in some twisted provision of land back, while Zionism itself has long understood itself as a

a colonial project meant to displace and eliminate the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine for its very beginning. Some white nationalists also argue that settler colonialism was really no different than any other conflict between indigenous people. So what does it even matter? My it makes right. And when generations of marginalized groups have been struggling to retain their social, cultural, economic and political sovereignty, and achieve justice, reparations, liberation after centuries of oppression and attempted annihilation, we need to stand in informed solidarity. Thus, it is vital for us to understand what it means to be indigenous. Welcome to Krapinia. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm here again with

Mia Wong, the other host of this point. podcast. Yes, and we are here to discuss two approaches to understanding indigionity. Obviously, this is not the final word on the matter, but just one perspective. And I've drawn primarily from the work of North American indigenous authors, namely Tayaki Alfred, Jeff Kontesel, and Robin Wall Kimra. So, you know, keep that in mind as we proceed. There may be other positions and perspectives and visionity coming from other groups and other people. And so I believe there are two principle highly overlap in ways that indiginity can be defined or interpreted.

One is as an identity formed as part of a colonial relationship and two, as an identity rooted in a relationship to place. I believe that each definition is incomplete without the other, but by understanding and synthesizing each notion of indigenousness, we can better ground. our approach decolonization and social revolution. So let's start with indigenity as an identity rooted in a relationship to place, whether that be physical as with land, social as with community, or cultural as with culture. As indigenous relationship to the land must be reciprocal with give and take based on a view of the land and water as a gift they must be cared for over generations. According to Haudenoshini mythology, as recounted by Robin Wall Kimra, in braided

sweetgrass, the mother goddess Sky Woman came to the land as an immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land, learning from other species to understand how to live on it, given as she received, and caring for the earth and its keepers for the sake of those who would inherit it when she passed on. Land is identity, it is ancestral connection, it is pharmacy, it is library, and it is home, the source of all that sustains, and the sacred ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to the world. So by this understanding, it can be said that indigenity is born out of land connection and established through observation and relationship. Indigenous peoples have historically been mobile, either by choice or by force,

but regardless of where they might find themselves, quote-unquote, homeland or not, even if there were other indigenous peoples in their new environments, as long as they observe the processes and ceremonies of generational relationship building, based on mutual respect, understanding, and love for the land in common, they remained indigenous. So then the question may arise, why aren't settlers indigenous to place if their family has lived in the land for generations? The answer lies in a relationship.

Settler society as a whole, is based on an extractivist capitalist relationship with the land, focused on exploiting the land and its natural resources. Without a relationship with the land that extends reference to a deeper understanding of its complex interdependence, settler society can never become indigenous to place. Of course, it goes without saying that not every indigenous group or indigenous practice is perfectly sustainable.

Some have been rather destructive and even speciocidal, particularly when they've recently moved into a place, as we could see in North American prehistory. But if we are to work with this definition to conceive of being indigenous as something based on cultivating a long-term relationship to place, then indigenity must be contingent on maintaining the health and longevity of that relationship. Without community, there cannot be indigeneity. Much like the trees in a forest are interconnected via subterranean networks, of Microsay, which enable them to share resources and survive as a whole, in order to be indigenous to place, community must exist to sustain that web of reciprocity with the land

so that all may flourish. Indigenity to place extends to culture as well, which is deeply tied to the land it develops on. Such practices should be reciprocal as ceremonies create communities and communities create ceremonies, as well as organic, not appropriating existence. in cultural celebrations or tending toward the commercial. Our social fabric has become withered and fragmented by the peace of modern life, leaving little room for ceremonies outside of religion or rights of personal transitions such as birthdays, weddings and funerals. But ceremonies and the shared emotions they generate are part of what builds community.

When we gather for graduations, for example, a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia, and excitement builds in the social atmosphere, hopefully fueling the confidence and strength of those who are going on to pursue the rest of their lives. But Kimura wants us to imagine standing by a river flooded with those same feelings as the salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Being indigenous to place means cultivating cultural ceremonies that honor the land and all the cycles and seasons of life within it. What are your thoughts on that, into particular, or approach than Dijanity.

I think there's a lot there that's interesting. I think I'm getting a better sense of what you were saying at the beginning when you were like this probably needs to be synthesized with the definition that's also about

like a relationship to colonialism. Yeah. But, you know, there's some sort of fun question mark examples of like the Chinese empire failing this where it's like like you do have a lot of stuff that's like okay we're gonna like build a relationship to nature

but the build a relationship to nature stuff is like we are going to clear this forest in order to build a temple that is like exactly set up on like a pentagram or whatever and so it's like okay hold on hold on hold your orders we have failed in creating a relationship

to the land we are in fact just making geometric shapes like yeah I think empires by their nature are going to run into some difficulties to put it mildly they're going to run into some difficulties with actually maintaining a reciprocal relationship with that because empires are built on extraction of people and of resources yep but you're absolutely right that there has to be a synthesis of this definition with the idea of indigionity as a colonial relationship

According to Tayaki Alfred and Jeff Conteiselle, Indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. It is an experience oppositional to colonial societies and states and a consciousness of struggle against such forces of colonization. No two indigenous groups are exactly alike, of course. There is a significant diversity in their cultures, contexts, and relationships with colonial forces,

but they do share that struggle to survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile to their existence. Efforts to marginalize and eradicate indigenous peoples may not always be as overt as they once will, but the historic and ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples, the erasure of indigenous histories, geographies, and languages, and the current situation of deprivation persist nonetheless. Even so-called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality that indigenous people remain,

as in earlier colonial eras, fundamentally occupied and disempowered peoples, stripped of autonomy in their own homelands, and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an inherently unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival. By this understanding of indigenity, it can be said that without a colonizer, without systems in place, and actions being taken to marginalise, disempower, and destroy their societies in favour of a colonial replacement. There is no Indigenous. Without colonialism, there would be no status of Indigenous to be imposed upon the groups of peoples whose very existence and claimed land is an obstacle to that colonial endeavour. The UN Working Group on Indigenous issues drew partially from this

understanding when they attempted to define Indigenous peoples in 1986. Quote, Indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those which having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories or parts of them. They form, at present, non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations, their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal systems. And so by this definition, the Amerinians in the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasi's in India, native north and South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis, Palestinians, Amosik, Sambi, Basques, Hawaiians, Māori, San, Muti, Papans, Chams, and many, many more are all indigenous peoples.

Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspired. women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast and IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that

Trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no.

I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the Girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money. It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast, Eating While Broke, is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future. This month, hear from top streamer, Zoe Spencer, and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre, as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.

If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what? Today now, obviously, it's like 100%. They believe everything. But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job. There's an economic component to communities thriving. If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail. And what I mean by fell is they don't have money to pay for food. They cannot feed their kids.

They do not have homes. Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them. Listen to eating while broke from the Black. Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of IHartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.

I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between. This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cessario, financier and public health advocate, Mike Milken, take to interactive CEO, Strauss Zellner. If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business. Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and her own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey. Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it wise to the top.

Listen to math and magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. But there are layers of nuance yet to be highlighted. The colonial situation is not a simple binary of indigenous and colonizer. For example, in the Americas, we have the immigrant situation and the situation of slavery, right? Where Africans are concerned, they were indigenous. to their own homelands, but displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime. They may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they were not driving settler colonial society either. In fact, historically, some were actually enslaved by indigenous people as well.

Yeah. And at the same time, there were members of the African diaspora who would join existing indigenous societies and later create their own, such as the Garifuna of St. Vincent, Honduras, and Belize. it's very attractive, I would say, or mentally compelling to fall into these kinds of binaries, colonizer, indigenous. But we should not allow these constructs to paint the whole picture. Yeah, and I mean, you mentioned the Kurds earlier, right? And there's a couple of political principles that groups like the PYD, you know, and sort of like the Kurdish freedom movement

have had to grapple, like one of their things is grappling with. Like, for example, there was like huge Kurdish participation in the Armenian genocide. And if you look at the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, when I talk about the PYD, that's like Kurdish freedom movement in Syria.

In Iraq, there's like the Iraqi Kurdish regional, like, government, right? Which is run by a different group. But those people, you know, and this is one of these things where like there are Kurdish people on both sides, this conflict. Like that group attempted to, for example,

like, prevent easy people from returning to their homes after they were, like, genocided from there by ISIS, right? So it's this, it's this thing where, like, all of this stuff gets kind of messy depending on, like, who has power in a given moment.

And it's something that's, to some extent, fluid enough that you can, on the one hand, like, be experiencing a genocide and then also immediately turn around and, you know, be the Kurdish regional government and attempt to assist a genocide, or attempt to, like, do a genocide against the Yazidis, so you can take more of their land. Yeah. But then on the other hand, you know, you have the PYD who was, like, backing,

was backing the Yazidis in that fight against the Kurdish regional government. So it's, yeah. Yeah, I think it's very easy to slip into this notion that. the experience of oppression will necessarily cause you to develop a cogent or consistent critique of oppression. Yeah. But often what we see in history is that oppression results in that group perpetuating harm now in line in other ways, either within their own group or inflicting that harm in other groups. there's nothing intrinsic to any group that grants them immunity from falling into those same patterns of domination, abuse, oppression, harm. Yeah.

People look to the example of Israel a lot, but a less familiar example for some would be the situation that established Liberia in Africa. Yeah. You know, where you literally had the descendants of enslaved people or formally enslaved people. going on to engage in settler colonialism in the territory that became Liberia to oppress and disadvantage the indigenous populations that previously occupy those territories

and continue to occupy those territories today. They created a stratified society that placed them at the top, mirroring the very system that they had fled. Yeah, and this is the thing where it's like it doesn't mean that, you know, people, like, swing around on the other end and be like, well, we actually have to, like, maintain the colonial relationship because, like, what if these people then did colonialism on us?

I was like, no. Yeah, no. That's not. No. Because you hear people making that argument with regard to, like, three Palestine, right? Yeah. People say, oh, well, then the Palestinians will just spin around and do a genocide on us. So we have to do a genocide on them.

Like, no. Yeah. And this is actually one of the things. I think there's two angles of the. is one, you see that in the U.S. too, where people are like, well, what if we do, if we do land back, then they're just going to, like, exterminate all the white people in the U.S., and it's like, no, that's, that's what you did. Like, I, like, hold on, hold on.

So then, you know, the second angle of this, too, is this becomes a motivating factor for colonizers. And this is just something that's true historically. If you look at the Bosnian genocide, right? The way that you get people to do with genocide is by convincing them that, The people they're doing a genocide against are about to do a genocide against them. And, you know, you see this in Bosnia, you see this Rwanda. This is a very, very common sort of, I don't even know what you call it. Like, trope feels like too weak of a word.

This is a very common step in the beginning of genocide, which I don't love. Zero out of 10, Mia not pro-genocide. More news at 10? Yeah. Yeah. It's something I wanted to mention regarding, I think, the application of indigenousity as a concept in Asia.

You mentioned the situation with the Yazidis and the Kurds. But you also see the governments of places like Indonesia and India and China and Vietnam and Bangladesh. Yeah. Not recognizing the existence of indigenous peoples within their territories. Yep. And these countries,

Like most countries in the world did not ratify the International Labor Organization Convention 169 in 1989, which was known as the Indigenous and Tribal People's Convention concerning the rights of Indigenous peoples. The UN's declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples passed in 2007 would, however, be voted on approvingly by most of the world, including the same countries that haven't recognized the indigenous peoples within their borders. All four of the countries that rejected the resolution, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand

were later changed their vote in favor of the Declaration. Of course, of their own tact on interpretations and emphasis on the declarations legally non-binding nature, as is to be expected from set the colonial societies. Yep.

I'm very interested in, you know, because we do have these ethnic minorities. We do have, in the case of India, you have the pre-Indo-European groups, the tribal group, And if you go back to the definition of indigeneity, according to the UN, it speaks of groups which form at present non-dominant sectors of society that are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations, their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity at the basis of their continued existence as people, etc., etc. You know, it speaks of those having historical continuance with pre-invasion, pre-codingal societies that developed, in their territories, they speak of groups that consider themselves distinct from other sectors

and societies and all prevailing on those territories. And so by this definition, I understand that people in these Asian countries, they may be like, oh, well, all from this place, right? So why does that group get this designation of indigenous? Well, we do not. And it goes back to again a colonial relationship. It goes back to the relationship between a group, and the broader society. And so it's not necessarily stripping away the fact that a particular group may be from an area, but more so speaking about how another group relates to the state in that area and the group that dominates the state in that area.

Yeah, like you look at this in the Chinese context, and it's like, okay, so like, by the time you're, like, bulldozing mosques in Xinjiang, like, I think you've gotten to, congratulations you have like created a indigenous settler divide yeah also just just speaking like the context does not begin and end with European colonization and direct European administration and invasion and that kind of thing you know prior to these invasions you did have the empires that were established in these areas i mean china was an empire question famously. Japan was an empire.

India was the home of several empires. Indonesia was the home of several empires. So while it may not be that this relation of indigenousity is based on the European settler colonialism, there is something to the history of empire in those areas, establishing those relationships. relationships that would later be elevated in some cases by those Europeans when they would come and they would, for example, select one ethnic group and elevate one ethnic group over another ethnic group, make a certain ethnic group administrators and put down another ethnic group, classify these kind of caste systems and ethnocratic divisions. Yeah, it's Rwanda. No, literally, literally.

Yeah. Canadian women are looking for more. More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.

Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcast. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either.

We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got here. by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care.

So they take matters into their own hands. They said, oh, hell no. I vowed, I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money. It's financial literacy. Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future. This month hear from top streamer, Zoe Spencer, and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre, as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up. If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures,

it's like, what? Today now, obviously, it's like 100%. They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job. There's an economic component. it to communities thriving. If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail. And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food. They cannot feed their kids. They do not have homes. Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them. Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of IHeart Media, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the First. I'm a lot of the podcast, frontiers of marketing. Math and magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses in industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing. I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between. This seasonal math and magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death Mike Sessario, financier and public health advocate, Mike Milken, take two interactive CEO, Strauss-Zalnik. If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk

and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business. Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey. Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top. Listen to math and magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. There are a lot of cases where these. sort of the indigenous colonizer divide become reflective of the way

that Europeans set up past system. Sometimes that's not true though. And one of the, I think, most hideous examples of this is West Papua, which we very briefly mentioned earlier, where West Papua and Indonesia are like not governed by the same colonial administration.

But when Indonesia gains independence, like the government there, and this is Sancaras government, right? This is like the nominal socialist one, wants to take control of West Papua because West Papua has all of these resources. And the people in West Papua don't want that, like they want to be an independence entity, but the Indonesians just roll in and invade them. And, you know, continue from Sukara to Sukarno, which is a unbelievably hideous series of genocides. And

One of the things that's really bleak about the sort of process of decolonization is like, you can see this shift in the way that these post-colonial societies are talking about what colonization is and where resistances to it, where it ceases to become about the struggle of people against the colonizing forces that oppress them. And it turns into something that's about like the continuity of national borders. You know, you get a really bleak example of this where like people talk about like the Bandung Conference, right, which is the sort of like, it's supposed to be like, this is like the big thing in like pan-Asian and pan-African, like, struggles coming together where like all these formerly colonized nations, like, come together and like issue this, issue a bunch of things. And it's

supposed to be this big moment of like, this is like the unity of post-colonial societies. That's like, still to this day, look back on in terms of like Afro-Asian solidarity. Like, this is the big one. But one of the things that they ratified at Bandung was a very small session that no one pays any attention to you, which is all of these countries put in their support for Indonesia's occupation of West Papua. Eventually, I'm going to do a long thing about this. It just is a really difficult subject to tackle and has to be done very carefully. But one of the things that happens is, you know, like the West Papuanans go to the UN, and all of the states that you would normally think of as, like,

the anti-colonial states are like, no, fuck you, like, you belong to Indo-Popan. And then you get all of these other countries who are like more neutral or more U.S. aligned. But because they're not allied with Indonesia, their reaction is like, wait, hold on, what do you mean there are black people in the Pacific? A. And B, like, holy shit, this is fucked up. But it sets this precedent that kind of like rolls on through like pan-Arabism and rolls on through a lot of these decolonial movements where once you've gotten your state,

it's fine to just like do horrifying repression against any other sort of ethnic group that's there because now that now that you have your post-colonial state like any attempt to interfere with the sovereignty of the state and change the borders even if it's like i don't know you're like the west sahara or you know you're like shingan or you're like the kurds right any attempt for those people to get their freedom is seen as like a Western-backed, like, separatist thing instead of an anti-colonial struggle. And I think that really was one of the things

that was like the death knell for, like, the post-colonial movements was their willingness to just walk in and machine gun people because we want the resources that these people's lands are on. Yeah. Honestly, that brings us to the topic of decolonization. Yeah. You know, because when we think about these definitions of the indigency as a cluelan relationship

and indigionity as a relationship to land, to nature, to the environment, I think it begs the question of how we approach this process of decolonization. Yeah. How do we go about abolishing the colonizer indigenous relationship? is it that we seek to pursue a universalization of indigianity to be formal and by that process accomplished the matter or is there some other framework or approach by which we can take on this topic of okay do we proceed with the with the concept of indignity

or does the concept of indiginity exist as a byproduct and a representation of the system that we are trying to get away from? So decolonization is commonly defined as the process of unsettling colonial power structures, whether that be through overturning acts of enclosure by building new commons, overtaining acts of possession by reclaiming our spaces and identities, or overtaken acts of administration through social revolution. Social revolution is a complete transformation for our society, by economy, culture, philosophy, relationships, technology, so on.

It is, as anarchists would approach it, an ongoing and heterogeneous change in people's powers, drives, and consciousness through practical education, as well as a progressive breakdown and transformation of the existing systems and institutions, alongside the building of new systems institutions, punctuated by major interruptions, ruptures, advances, that whole messy process. with the aim of self-liberation. Yeah. Something that I've broken down as involved in confrontation with the powers that be, non-cooperation with the established order of things, and the prefiguration of new social relations, institutions, infrastructure, and practices in the here and now. If we maintain the interpretation of indigenousity as based on one's position in a colonial relationship, then the decolonization process will entail the abolition of that,

that relationship as the premise of identity and therefore the abolition of indigeneity as a status. Colonial legacies have effectively left indigenous communities legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally, socially and spiritually weakened within the narrow parameters of the state, where they end up diverting the crucial energy necessary to confront state power and develop the process of decolonization toward mimicking the practices of the dominant non-indigenous legal political institutions through the processes of land claims and self-confirmat. And by pursuing these strategies, I think what we notice is this tends toward a division rather than a solidarity building, division both internally and between indigenous communities,

where land claims, for example, clash, or where certain members of a society, of a community, utilize their position above others in that society or community to gain certain advantages for themselves, sometimes to the detriment of that society or community. So I think any sort of approach to colonization has to account for the ways that some approaches to the colonization can end up perhaps misdirecting from a subjective perspective, the work that is necessary to dismantle the colonial order rather than merely assert a position was in it. But this idea of indigenity via colonization is just one understanding of the term. And my approach to it is, of course, one subjective interpretation of that definition and where it might lead.

We need to explore another approach, I think, to decolonization, and one that recognizes the power and potential of indigenous relationships with the land. Now, globally, the UN recognizes that indigenous peoples protect 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity. And scientists have shown that indigenous management practices in Brazil, Canada, and Australia provides the same level of ecosystem support and protection as any imposed protected area, which makes it abundantly clear that the colonial approach of conservation via dispossession removes the very people who take care of our most important ecosystems.

I don't believe that merely building a connection with the land can make someone indigenous. But not being indigenous doesn't exclude us from aiding in the renewal of the indigenous world. Kimmer uses the example of the broadleaf planter, also known as the white man's footprint. Despite not being indigenous to the Americas, it has become an honored member of the plant community. because it lives as a good neighbor instead of as a destructive invader. While other invasive species poisoned the soil overrun the land out-compete indigenous species, the white man's footprint took on a strategy of helpful coexistence, even sharing some of its healing properties with those who ask of it.

It is not indigenous, but it has become naturalized. To quote Kimmerer, being naturalized a place means to live as if This is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters. To take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all of our relatives depend on it.

Because they do. End quote. Decolonisation will require us to uproot invasive capitalist settler societies in order to rebuild in a way that treats the land like the home that be shared and are responsible for. It will require us to receive an honour, knowledge in the land, to care for its keepers and to pass on that knowledge to the next generation. As always, all power to all the people. Peace. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is Amy Roboc alongside T.J. Holmes

from the Amy and T.J. podcast. And there is so much news, information, commentary coming at you all day and from all over the place. What's fact, what's fake, and sometimes what the F. So let's cut the crap, okay? Follow the Amy and T.J. podcast, a one-stop news and pop culture shop to get you caught up and on with your day. And listen to Amy and T.J. on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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