The Meaning of Indigeneity: A Changing Understanding

 

Throughout centuries, military empires have established governance over foreign lands, imposing their cultures, customs and beliefs upon those already inhabiting the spaces conquered. This struggle represents that of conqueror and conquered – of settler and indigenous. Marc H. Ellis, author of the book Israel and Palestine – Out of the Ashes: The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century, states that this colonization brings dislocation and destruction, “the alienation of land and sacred space, the uprooting of culture and tradition, and the diminishing of specific languages and rituals” (Ellis 75). It is therefore a narrowing of perspective toward the ethical and religious belief systems of the conquerors, forced upon the conquered through the diminishment of their own systems and religions.

Yet Ellis also states that this cycle of violence – the waves of conquerors that establish themselves in a particular land – is an ever-changing imposition of one system upon the other and the struggle between them, such that those who were once conquerors are conquered by another group. Thus indigeneity is a relative term; people considered indigenous to a region once migrated there, conquered any inhabitants, and intermarried with other cultures, such that their “cultural and religious sensibilities” evolved to include pieces from the groups they encountered and conquered. The turmoil experienced by groups that the modern era perceives as indigenous “may be the same kind of assault that they perpetrated at an earlier time,” indicating an ever shifting understanding of indigeneity, as well as implying that once enough time has passed as to allow for a solidification of the conquerors’ belief system as that of the background or norm, then these beliefs of the conqueror (perhaps mingled with those already existing in the land, and thus different than they were at the outset) might come to be considered indigenous.

This ability of what is defined as indigenous to evolve over time with each new wave of colonization and epoch of cultural identity is exemplified by Pablo Neruda’s poem “Las palabras,” which describes the author’s relationship to Chilean Spanish, and the beauty that he sees within it. In the poem, Neruda writes that the Spanish conquerors strode through the land in search of crops and riches, devastating the earth that they passed, and replacing the religions, tribes, and pyramids they swallowed up with ones of their own that fell from their boots, beards, helmets, and horseshoes. These conquerors “took the gold and left the gold…took everything and left everything…they left the language” (Neruda). Thus, despite the destruction left behind, a now-integral part of the land – the Spanish language – was left “like little stones, the luminous words that remained there shining” (Neruda). Spanish is now the national language of Chile and other countries traversed by conquistadors from Spain, exemplifying how pieces of those conquering a land can become integral, or indigenous, to it over time.

Thus, the current struggle of indigenous culture to persist within a settled socioeconomic and cultural framework, and struggle of the settler’s frameworks to predominate, might instead be reframed and looked at in terms of a mingling of the two – of a changing relationship which itself evolves and which can benefit from such evolution. Through understanding this complex and shifting nature of indigeneity, it is possible to visualize a future in which “both the settler and indigenous culture will come into a fruitful interplay …both cultures will change” (Ellis 76). Ellis states that this understanding of religion, belief, and culture’s relationship to the land is important in the Israel/Palestine conflict, as the births of the three Abrahamic religions stem from “a distinct mixture of tribal religions and symbols that in their day were fought over and where the appearance and disappearance of specific cultural and religious forms became the norm” (Ellis 75). Both Israelis and Palestinians can claim the indigeneity of their heritage within Jerusalem at various points in history, just as they were also conquerors of the land, and the religions of Judaism and Islam were themselves developed through the amalgamation of various indigenous traditions into monotheistic belief systems that conquerors brought with them.

This interweaving of different practices has been observed as a natural process throughout history, and thus the “broken middle” – a state of being in-between, unfinished, a mixture of reality and hope – can be seen as representative of the nature of Jerusalem, which Ellis states is a “geographic, cultural and religious middle” of both Jews and Palestinians in which both “can meet in their suffering and brokenness” (Ellis 81). Finding this broken middle is essential to mitigating current conflict, and requires the understanding that the identities of both Jews and Palestinians have evolved over time, and will continue to be transformed in spite of attempts at segregation. Therefore, Ellis proposes an overarching citizenship for both Jews and Palestinians within Jerusalem and the surrounding region that is “bound to neither ethnic nor religious identity” – one in which commonality is found in an understanding of this broken middle, and in the changing nature of religion and indigeneity (Ellis 77).

Ellis states that this citizenship will undercut the attitudes that have perpetuated cycles of dislocation and destruction, of settlement and invasion, through recognition that “the divide between settlers and indigenes breaks down over time because the barriers themselves are false historically and in the present” (Ellis 78). A cultural and political system must evolve that transcends the “assumed and essentialized identities” of the communities within Jerusalem, thereby refusing existence within a system that “can only continue the cycle of dislocation and death” (Ellis 78-86). As Neruda observes, the mingling of cultures of both conqueror and conquered – no matter the current understanding of which is which – can be beautiful, and it is in this understanding that Ellis sees a path toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Words Fell from the Conquerors’ Boots.” Illustration by Kaia Karimi.

Citations

Ellis, Marc H. Israel and Palestine – Out of the Ashes: The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century. Pluto Press, 2002.

Neruda, Pablo. “Las palabras.” Altazor Revista Electrónica de Literatura, Apr. 2024, https://www.revistaaltazor.cl/pablo-neruda-las-palabras/.