Indigenous

Next up in my - I dunno, am I having a mid-life crisis? Anyway next in my whatever-it-is, I've been reading Timothy Morton's "Dark Ecology", via a copy kindly lent by Alissa. I don't have a lot to directly note here, partially because it feels like the sort of thing I need to read all the way through before venturing a response, and partially because I feel like I'm only really "getting" about 50% of it. The gist is clear, but Morton writes like the Professor he is: a lot of sentences where I know all the words individually but the way they're joined together is a little unusual.

Two things I've noted today. The first is I need to read Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself". Morton spends some time exploring the Law of Indivisibility (one of the annoying things about this sort of book is that he assumes all his readers know what the "Law of Indivisibility" is, so he doesn't bother explaining it until several pages after he starts referencing it). He notes that on several measures (mass, etc) humans are more "other stuff" than "human". We're all carrying around a lot of bacteria for example, but if we weren't we'd be dead, so are they part of the human or extra to it? The answer to that either-or question, of course, is "yes". Anyway, it reminded me of those famous lines:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well, I contradict myself.

(I am large, I contain multitudes)

But then it occured to me that I've never actually read the whole poem. That's all I know. I've never been into poetry, but maybe I should give this one a go.

The second point and the reason for the name of this note is I had some half-formed, probably wrong thoughts about the word "Indigenous" in relation to people. Morton finally, almost exactly halfway through the book, mentions "indigenous people" (sic) when it's been pretty obvious he was going to since the first page. I've always felt weird about this term. I never worked out how to articulate it in a way that wouldn't immediately be construed as something I'm not saying. I still probably don't have it right, but what occured to me to today is maybe this is the same objection David Graeber had to being called an "Anarchist anthropologist". Graeber said he aimed to practice anarchist anthropology, but he was just an Anthropologist: "Nobody refers to 'the Liberal anthropologist'". Graeber's belief was that anarchism is something you do, not something you are.

I need to be careful here. Indigenous communities worldwide, but especially in the more brutal settler colonies of Australia and North America, have been subject to deliberate attempts at total genocide. In Australia, this has the potential to result in lateral violence, where those descended from multiple rotations of stolen children are told directly or indirectly that they're "not Aboriginal enough", that they "don't look Aboriginal", that they "don't even know which mob they come from". I'm absolutely not saying a person of Aboriginal ancestry who identifies as Aboriginal is not such.

At the same time, I find it troublesome that we talk about Indigeneity as something applying genetically rather than culturally. We say the French live in France and the Indians live in India. Nobody talks about "Indigenous French" or "Indigenous Indians" - except I guess in a way Le Pen or Modi do, but that's Fascism, something different altogether. Yet many people in these countries descend from countless generations who lived on the same land. It seems to me that Indigenous/Aboriginal are best thought of in this context as adverbs, not adjectives: a way of doing, not a way of being. William Buckley's story is somewhat confusing, but it seems likely he and the people he lived with for 32 years considered him to be living an Aboriginal life, regardless of his background as an English transportee.

This is I guess some attempt to say we all have an Indigenous connection to somewhere. For Settlers like me, it's complicated: My connection to the various indigenous British Isles knowledge was effectively lost before I was born (witch trials etc), yet I'll always be something of a stranger to the Wurundjeri lands I now live in and the palawa lands I grew up on. The trick will be to fuse these together somehow, starting with Makarrata and moving on from wherever we land after that.

Lots to think about. Likely my views on this will become more nuanced.