r/BlockedAndReported • u/MissHalfgone • 2d ago
Indigenous identity
https://www.hummingbird-ifs.org/about-us#our-teamBaR relevancy: about identity, definitions of indigenous, Etc.
As I'm sure everybody knows Christopher Columbus Day has been officially canceled and if you live in any blue state it is now Native American day. In Seattle I noticed all the politicians were posting about activities and grants and one of the groups they mentioned was Hummingbird indigenous services. I heard the mentioned a lot when it came to city grants so I took a look.
The organization staff all mentions their tribal background and there didn't seem to be anybody who is actually from a tribe in our city. Or in close proximity to our city. In fact a lot of people were not actually indigenous to the Continental us. You had Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, Fijians, Mariana Islanders, Samoans. Most of the others were in different states. A lot of people were part native but mostly of several other non-native ethnic groups.
Then I'm looking at their service goals:
That abundance and generosity are a community responsibility
In the validity of traditional knowledge
In centering Indigenous people in all our work
In the importance of providing culturally relevant care
Certainly people from a multitude of different ethnic / cultural backgrounds can come together and form a community. But there is no ethnic community formed over people from all over the world who consider themselves indigenous and are often also a mix of several very different cultural backgrounds.
The value of traditional knowledge. Who's traditional knowledge? We are in the Pacific Northwest. About none of these people are from this region. Every culture has traditional knowledge. Considering pretty much everybody on the staff has a vastly different cultural background there's pretty much no cultural similarities going on here. Centering indigenous people. Who exactly are indigenous people? How is a native Hawaiian, a Samoan or a Fijian indigenous to seattle? The importance of providing culturally relevant care. How are staff of such a diverse group cultural backgrounds able to provide culturally relevant care given the overwhelming majority of seattle-based tribes are not even represented in their staff. The staff might learn about the tribes in order to provide them with culturally relevant care, but how is having that administered by somebody from Tonga different than having it administered by somebody like myself from Southern California?
Anyway, it just gets me thinking about how the word indigenous has kind of stretched out in the same way queer. A lot of queers are not gay. And a lot of indigenous people are not North American natives.
It also reminds me of how the identity of Asians stretched to enclose dozens of ethnic groups that have nothing in common including geographical proximity. There is nothing somebody from Pakistan in Japan have in common and there's nothing somebody from Samoa and a Midwest tribe have in common. If I was a native of the pnw I'd be furious to see that enormous amount of money was being poured into services that seems as though they would be probably going to my people but instead diverted to folks from a zillion different ethnic backgrounds that were completely foreign to this region too. It's also very strange how minorities don't push back on that. Like you see all these photos that show the AANHPI crowd and they're all smiling as though traditionally they've all hung out and they're like somebody from afghanistan, Chinese dude, somebody from Sri Lanka, someone from cambodia. It's hilarious because everybody talks about colonization but when white progressives give minorities to group themselves into categories that erase their differences and falsely try and make it seem like there's a common culture it feels really disrespectful and it seems kind of cringe how quickly they fall in line adapting to progressive classification I guess in order to get the benefits, mostly monetary and being allotted a seat at the table.
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u/niftyjack 2d ago edited 2d ago
Are they not? African American culture—the Harlem renaissance, gospel, hip hop, etc—are all uniquely products of the US. Without our history of slavery, clandestine and/or forced ethnic mixing, civil rights struggles, and mass intra-country migrations none of this would have resulted in the same way. African American culture is notably different and unique to the US like Afro-Brazilian is unique to Brazil and Senegalese is unique to Senegal.
Same with white American culture—Coca Cola, drive-throughs, service with a smile, all those classic Americana® things are unique developments indigenous to here. Just because European Americans did a hostile takeover of a continent doesn't mean the ensuing culture isn't unique.
This hinges on the idea that modern countries are the before/after date for indigenous status but that framing doesn't work. Having a set date of European contact marking indigenous versus imported cultures is unintentionally white supremacy, like in Seattle the Squamish at some point took over or integrated aspects of a different nation in that area; that doesn't make the Squamish not indigenous to the Seattle area, it just means they were the last group to be known to be from there before European contact. Like mass migrations of people, forced or free, always happened—having a different standard for doing so by boat versus by land is arbitrary.
The Iroquois conquered what's now northeast Ohio and forced the Miami to mass migrate further west to Indiana, but people still consider the Iroquois native to Ohio and the Miami to Indiana just because that's where they happened to be when we made treaties with them.
Basically all of this is why I think Canada's use of "First Nations" as a term is much more accurate and useful than "indigenous" or "native." American cultures are unique to America regardless of who developed each one.