On indigeneity

This post got delayed for Covid reasons, but better late than never.

Looking around my bedroom, I see lots of man-made things. Everything in here started as an idea – the packet of nappies, its cotton harvested and formed and shaped to mould to a small baby’s bum, wrapped in plastic derived from petrol pumped from the ground; the wardrobe, its wood precision-cut and sanded, smoothed down and assembled. The shelves the same, each heaving with the polished ideas of paper leaves bound together between hard covers. I look around – everything in here, everything I can see, started as an idea in the mind of Man.

Everything, except one thing. I glance at the top of a dresser and see a stone, a large chunk of what looks to be unrefined crystal quartz I found on a beach somewhere, I can’t remember where. It could have been a beach in California, where I holidayed a couple of years ago, or Rhode Island, or the Caribbean, many more years ago. I’ve carried this rock, this sea-washed stone, between several house moves, to the point where I’ve lost track of its originating place, its root. This stone alone, of all the things I can see around me in my bedroom, did not originate in the mind of Man. Instead, it emerged as an idea of the Earth Itself, refined only by the movements and machinations of the sea.

Have we ever been so isolated from the Earth and Its raw manifestations? I look around and see plastic, plastic, plastic. Disposable, yet eternal. The Plastic Age will be picked over in many generations hence, by archaeologists trying to pinpoint the moment of our global collapse.

Or, maybe not. In generations hence, there might not be archaeologists – only tribes, tribes who know better than to pick over a global civilisation’s graveyard, who tell stories instead, songs about what happens when you build too high, robbing the foundations of your house to reach the clouds.

Europeans have an uphill road ahead of them, to relearn indigeneity. We haven’t been properly indigenous since the original sin of the Roman Empire, a glittering fever dream that infected every corner of our continent in the centuries since – followed by the rest of the globe.

I recently read an excellent book by Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, that accelerated my already-extant thinking and questing for a European indigeneity. Yunkaporta makes the point that even an Indigenous sense of time differs from a Western one: it is cyclical, interlinked with cycles of family and ancestors, with cycles of nature, cycles of culture and civilisation, birth and decay and rebirth. Time and place are linked, such that stories of the past can be entrusted to and held in the land. When your ancestors’ stories are kept by the land you live in, your relationship with the land is by necessity custodial.

When your stories are kept in books you can take to any land, or in 0s and 1s which resolve to words on a screen; when your ancestors stay dead; when time moves in a straight line, from past to present to future; when your relationship with the land also moves in a straight line, demanding growth, growth, growth forever – how can you enter into right relation with time, with place, with people? What incentive is there to take care of the Earth?

Now I sit in my lounge, jumbles of baby plastic and books and polyurethane furniture around me. I see one seashell that’s freed itself of the glue my middle son used to attach it to paper. It is the one thing in this room purely of the Earth. I look out my window at the Victorian terrace opposite – gravel, brick walls, cars. Bushes, upheavals of the Earth, are sparse.

The Roman empire has reached its apex in the American concept of whiteness. Roman citizenship was reserved for elites and conferred rights to own land and vote. Without citizenship, without this permission to help shape Rome, you were merely Rome’s subject, a tally number in a tax record, to be dealt with at the pleasure of empire. Whiteness emerged in America to differentiate citizens from slaves, to elevate settlers above Indigenous. The citizenship of whiteness expanded from just the land-owning English settlers, to other Western European settlers, to any native English speaker with pale skin. This anglophone class of privilege now even extends to pale Australians whose ancestors were exiled East End convicts.

Whiteness sets itself up as the opposite of indigeneity. It is the mechanism through which the land is exploited for growth, ruined, and abandoned, at least in the Western world. (China, the oldest empire, has its own complicated dynamics, on which I don’t feel entitled to comment.) So for Europeans to reclaim indigeneity, they must sacrifice whiteness – and the worldview of empire that it entails.

But how can pale Europeans counter whiteness, and the empire that built it? This is particularly fraught for those of English lineage, in whom can be traced successive waves of settling invaders – Romans, Vikings, Normans – even the Celts were originally settlers on this island. Our prejudice against those with red hair hints at prejudice towards a long-buried indigeneity, a relation to land so broken that the English drove the creation of an empire on which the sun never set.

Indigeneity is a right relation, situating yourself within ongoing cycles of people, time, and land. Indigeneity sees ancestors and their stories in the land, and therefore preserves the land so that the stories can continue to be told. If the stories are disrupted, the land is disrupted and must be made whole.

Europe is a deeply disrupted continent, its cities built tall from the pillagings of empire. But underneath, it’s good land. It holds stories which are crying to be told, animals and blooms desperate to live free. The Earth wants to emanate, to bloom, to hold our stories, because the mind of Man is really the Earth’s Mind, as we are Its children.

So Europeans can start by listening to the Earth, taking care of It, and giving It their ancestral stories. We can also uplift the voices of those Indigenous whose right relation we have disrupted, as well as those who have maintained their right relation even through the privations of empire. In cycles of time, we can help to heal the Earth and all Its children – if we can step back into right relation with our land, and each other.