What does it mean to be indigenous to a land?
What does it mean to be indigenous to a land? How long does it take to earn the title of being indigenous? Does this provide people with any sort of power over newer settlers or outsiders? These are all questions that are pulled out to the forefront in Ellis’s book Out of the Ashes. The Oxford Dictionary defines the term “indigenous” as “to be born in a specific place,” but this definition is far from all-encompassing. Indigenous people often consider themselves to be connected by “experiences shared by a group of people who have inhabited a country for thousands of years,” which could suggest that time is important to the claim of being “indigenous” to a place, but that even more important than this is the culture that one is born into and whether this culture stems from that of their ancestors many generations earlier (Cunningham, page 403).
Although this shared and ancient history can be important and should not be overlooked, indigeneity is much more complex because “cultural and religious sensibilities have evolved over time” (Ellis, page 76). Colonialism and the history of a land can never be boiled down to a single group of people, and the process of conquering land, as unfortunate as it may sound, is hardly ever peaceful, meaning that even “indigenous” people often have a complicated history that often includes migration and assault. Indigeneity as both a term and as a claim is static and constantly changing. To suggest that an indigenous culture has been or will be preserved is unrealistic. Instead, it is important to understand where a given culture came from and how they have changed over time with the land that they are settled in.
This debate on the definition of what constitutes a person as “indigenous” to a land has been brought into Jerusalem as the Palestinians and the Israelites continue to try to share the land. Palestinians have “technically” held claim to the land of Jerusalem and its surrounding areas for a much longer time than the Israelites, but as a group, their identity has undergone significant amounts of change. The adaptations of Palestinians to their land and to the many cultures that they have interacted with over time have made it so that today, there is not necessarily a debate between “indigenous people” versus “outsiders,” but instead the debate has shifted to be between “settlers (Jews of European and North African background), and those who have been dislocated from the land in the twentieth century (mostly Palestinians defined within the cultural patterns of Middle Eastern Islam)” (Ellis, page 76-77).
Ultimately, Ellis is suggesting that Israel and Jerusalem need to practically reverse the cycles of violence and settlement that pushed the Palestinians to for the most part become dislocated from the land that they are indigenous to, and to instead work together towards “equal rights and a common political destiny” (Ellis, page 77). Getting to this point would require the Israelites and the Palestinians to recognize one another as equals and to work together without either group fully letting go of their culture and history, which is a much more difficult task than it sounds at first. Palestinians can claim power due to being indigenous and having a longer history tied to the land itself, but Israelites currently occupy much more of the land, especially more of the Old City, which could be used as a leverage point by them to claim power. This belief of each group that they are “more powerful” than the others can complicate the idea of creating an equal society and ultimately is a large part of the reason why there is still debate over the claim of the land today.
Citations:
Cunningham, Chris, and Fiona Stanley. “Indigenous by definition, experience, or world view.” BMJ (Clinical research ed.) vol. 327,7412 (2003): 403-4. doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7412.403
Ellis, Marc H. Israel and Palestine out of the Ashes the Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century. Pluto Press, 2002.
Image: https://www.cfr.org/sites/default/files/image/2023/10/israel_palestine.png
Nice post on the meaning of indigenous as discussed in Ellis and the other article you bring in.
ReplyDeleteClarification: Israelites is the term used for people living in the region during the Iron Age (i.e. during the 1st and 2nd millennium BCE). Israeli is the term used for the modern people.