The dictionary.com definition states:
- https://www.dictionary.com/browse/indigenous
- originating in and characteristic of a particular region or country; native (often followed by to):
the plants indigenous to Canada.- Indigenous. relating to or being a people who are the original, earliest known inhabitants of a region, or are their descendants:
the Indigenous Maori of New Zealand;
the Indigenous languages of the Americas.- innate; inherent; natural (usually followed by to):
feelings indigenous to human beings.
The meriam-webster.com definition states:
- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indigenousindigenous adjective
in·dig·e·nous | \ in-ˈdi-jə-nəs \
- a) produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment
indigenous plants
the indigenous culture
b) Indigenous or less commonly indigenous : of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group
Indigenous peoples- : INNATE, INBORN
... and the Oxford definition is simply:
- https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries. ... indigenousbelonging to a particular place rather than coming to it from somewhere else
When people native to an area use this word, we should trust they have chosen this word for good reason.
Today it's important for me to look at my own indigenousness or indigeneity, because it's increasingly coming up as something colonialist white culture has abandoned, damaged, insulted or even forgotten about itself. And, if I am to connect with the Earth and serve it as a good person, I don't think it's so good to continue doing that bad thing.
It may read strangely for readers but imagine someone raised "White" personally suffered from Whiteness. I can assure you it's felt damaging to me at times, despite and because of so-called privileges of being treated unfairly, or "more than" fairly. Naturally, I am not speaking for the people who truly suffered and I understand all who feel the need to avoid my narrative. Let my feelings and writings serve who they will; it is all composed with the highest most authentic intent of alleviating suffering through truth telling.
As someone who innately distrusts the bad ways of our society, and as someone who is very empathetic, I have an inordinate amount of "culture cringe" when I navigate colonized structure, imperial ways and I view their abusive relationships to the natural world. It began with strange feelings about consumerism, and the health impacts of the marketed junk food; it merged with deep concerns with Western medicine when I was prescribed an anti-depressant at age twelve for what they determined was something related to manic depression. It continued, even under the spell of the experimental drug, as increasing skepticism toward all notions of "success" portrayed by movies and the media, towards the institution of Christmas, and so on.
What they did not realize, nor did they have the wisdom to teach, nor did my parents and guardians have the spirituality to navigate, and I had to ultimately teach alone and by myself through innate gifts was ... my spirituality. So from single digits, I was blessed to be partially "ejected" from Western culture by default and it was not until much later that I realized it was a blessing rather than an alienation.
Eventually I came to recognize that of the "Caucasian" and "Asian" stories of biologically and spiritually influential ethnicities I come from — Irish, Ashkenazim, Luxembourgish, Tatar — I was retaining a number of traits. One is a sort of "indigenous" draw to nomadism. Another is a draw to basketing, woodworking, herbalism, foraging and gardening as means of providing shelter, medicine and food. That is to say, I recognized that something innate and ethnically default "activated" when I felt betrayed and harmed by my guardianship existing in colonialist culture; and this was a survival mechanism of some powerful type. It was also something that I very much, very deeply and spiritually respect, as opposed to the opprobrious marble and concrete catacombs, heavy locked doors, labels & filing cabinets and torture chambers that represent the power centers of "white" survival.
How could I respect the pillaging, piracy, rape, genocide and domination of costumed "law makers" and "bankers" that had no more connection to the Earth's gifts than their religion that forgave all their idiocy by default? How could I believe the bizarre (later I learned to recognize as a "supremacist") notion that this way was considered somehow more advanced, futuristic, contemporary, realistic, pragmatic than my own in-born skills that actually gave me the mental and soulful fortitude to see the love and opportunity my parents were trying so hard to impart to me? In short, how could I live the lies that ingratitude tells us once I awakened to how grateful I truly felt?
Well, I could not. And as much as I spent my twenties trying to connect this sort of indigenous identity to my immediate family and friends, I saw a greater and greater gap between us. I tried to identify it with the emotions I felt, the emotions that had been my guide and my friend when they turned me to my own inherent gifts. However, sorrow, frustration, sadness, feelings of weakness and impotency were not serving as useful identifiers of what I was experiencing.
In retrospect, the problem could be broken down in this way: If some of my family respected and encouraged my deep interest in natural diet, other members of my family would scoff and laugh at such interests as if they were ridiculous elitist notions of supremacy. If some of my family respected and encouraged my deep interest in spirituality, energy work and our connection to ancestors, others showed disgust, fear, horror or even entertainment at the idea of "gruesome" topics of spirit. At times I would find this entertainment value the only means of accessing a way to commune with myself and living relatives on Earth with living relatives in the ether or hereafter. If some friends could understand my whim to avoid, redefine and question the concepts of "ownership" of all kinds, others would seek property, material gains and accomplishments in the colonized structures I found just as ridiculous and gruesome as they found me.
Quite painfully, I could see that none of this was solely a fault, and much of it was the result of trauma based responses to authentic, epigenetically instilled existential terror. Gradually, and most recently thanks largely to the work that my father Willing is doing, I have come to understand more intricacies about the existential terror that white people instill in life forms: the "shows of power", the "shows of strength", the possessiveness, the unnecessary obsessive exactitude of what is "proper", the intolerance, the deep insecurities and the fears of inadequacy.
I can't speak for all people who are considered the supremacist cultures, who "pass for" White or who are called White from birth and are given "White people" things, identities and privileges. Yet my journey through whiteframe (and to a minor extent "Jewframe"), from my perspective as a soul experiencing the honor of a human relationship to loyalty (to life and Earth), to sacredness (of life) and to arts (of creation and medicine), has proven to me that sadness and weakness are intricately and intimately tied up, in the minds of white people, with indigenousness.
It is partially this reason that white people have such difficulty connecting with their true selves and so easily float around "trying on" the identities of others. These are not just attempts to address feelings inside them, but to actively and aggressively deny them. They are the ways of those white people, which we might call the colonized colonizers (or sexually abusive sexually abused, or tortured torturers) of trying to deny life in the face of life: by constantly redefining the inherent self as arbitrary, unreachable, unrooted, based in nothing, totally and completely relative to abstract thought, the white person hopes to "rise above" the intergenerational trauma and also forcefully "lift" (forcefully remove) others from it as they are causing it. It is the mind abused mind abuser that beats someone and then offers the drug to quell the pain, and thinks of themselves as savior. The more victimhood they can gather and collect as aspects of self-identity, the more narcissistic and tiny they can make their world, and vice versa. Hurting and curing individuals on a one-on-one basis is a cultural mode that colonization is entirely intrigued and preoccupied with.
So much so, that it is the basis for stories of heroism and villainy in the most popular stories that Hollywood exports to the world — with the heroes being the ones that "learn the right lessons" from the trauma, and the villains being the ones that fail to learn from the trauma. Part of the American dream is the delusion that the broken person who puts themselves back together and "picks themselves up" by "their own bootstraps" is the only practical form of every-day healing that can be done, over and over.
This isn't to say white people are totally free of victimhood. On the contrary. Whites and the frantic Zionist Jews that talk of the greater tribe as mere "goyem" are traumatized (traumatizers), which re-introduce the cultures of abuse continually because they are haunted. Abused abusers are re-living and re-enacting stories of abuse in an attempt to sort the fact and fiction from their past and present. When were they truly hurt, when were they merely insulted, when did they lose control and snap, when did they project their traumas onto others, and when did they (in fear) begin plotting to damage others in a "strike first" policy?
Part of metabolizing trauma, as psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem sagely suggests, is the ability to recognize it happened. To get through the dizzying mental illness of "detachment" that pervades whiteframe and colonized colonizer culture is going to take work.