Let me also take a moment to say that the whole concept of indigeneity, constantly invoked by a certain species of pro-Palestine activist, is an utter waste of time. Neither side has any clear historical claim to being the first people there, as neither are descendants of the Canaanites described in the Torah. (The notion that Jewish people are indigenous to Palestine is denied by their own holy book - Abraham was from Iraq!) We will never, ever resolve the historical debates to anyone’s satisfaction. More to the point, though… rights do not stem from indigeneity. I understand that, to a large degree, academics essentially reverse-engineered the concept in order to give moral heft to the plight of the Native Americans, who were the victims of a largely-successful genocide. But the rights of the Native Americans did not depend on their indigenous nature, especially considering that like all people they came here from somewhere else. We shouldn’t have slaughtered them not because they had some sort of unique connection to the land that they were on but because they were human and in possession of rights. The same applies to Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs - they are there, they have the right to stay and to live in peace and prosperity. There is no lawyering our way out of this by pretending we know who was there first. The concepts of democratic rule, human rights, egalitarianism, and international law must be enough.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/can-the-liberal-democratic-project
This person does not seem to know what indigeneity actually is, indigenous activists have been dealing with the damage done by this unhelpful nonsensical "who was here first" pseudo-definition of indigeneity for a long time. And that use of a "we" in "we shouldn't have slaughtered them" is a bit troubling to me.
what is indigeneity?
I wouldn't reckon myself indigenous, so take this with a grain of salt and maybe do your own research later, but... The most boring and obtuse but also accurate definition of an indigenous person by my understanding is basically just "thon is the counterpart to the settler in a settler-colonial dynamic", where settler-colonialism is basically the form of colonialism that seeks to eradicate or assimilate natives rather than to simply exploit the locals.
I find that trying to define "indigenous" any more concretely than "settler's counterpart", either as "the first people in an area" or as "the people who have continuously inhabited an area the longest" or even as "those who live with the land as stewards", is sort of essentialist and non-dialectical. These definitions will tend to include groups we want to exclude and exclude groups we want to include, and many of these definitions end up framing indigeneity as a "property dispute". Trying to define indigeneity by strict criteria ends up making the intended referents continually need to prove that they really do fit in the box, e.g. Sámi people find claims to their indigeneity questioned so as to imply that they're actually demanding "more rights than their due"; while the intended non-referents of indigeneity will continually try to prove that they really do fit in the box after all, e.g. white "Rhodesians" claimed that Great Zimbabwe was built by Europeans, and attempted to suppress any research that challenged this notion, in order to claim that they were the "real" natives of Zimbabwe. In the worst cases these types of essentialist definitions of indigeneity end up justifying anti-immigrant xenophobia, as conflating locals with natives in turn ends up conflating immigrants with settlers.
When Europeans reached the shores of Turtle Island, it was the natives who taught them about the land and its flora and fauna, and who helped them survive in such an unfamiliar territory. It was the natives who were used as slaves or as cheap labor for resource extraction in early cross-Atlantic trade. It was the natives whose internal conflicts were exploited by Europeans to gain a foothold. And it was natives who then found themselves relegated to the lower class of the settler-colonial dynamic, killed and displaced and assimilated as their land was seen as something to be owned and exploited. And among the settlers were of course not just wealthy bourgeoisie, but in fact included many poor proletarians who would be given the spoils of conquest in order to pacify any revolutionary sentiment, and whose labor would then serve to build and maintain this system. And for other indigenous peoples we see similar rhymes to these types of stories.
If anybody who actually is indigenous has anything to add or correct, please do. But in any case Freddie DeBoer is very wrong to treat "indigenous" as purely a word to pull at the heartstrings and provide a moral basis for Native American rights — "indigenous" is genuinely a useful term when describing a specific type of dynamic between two groups. For Freddie DeBoer to argue against labeling groups as indigenous because "the concepts of democratic rule, human rights, egalitarianism, and international law must be enough", ignores the fact that labels are incredibly useful in actually understanding the material conditions that we need to work with in order to actually achieve democracy, equality, and human rights for all.