Indigeneity, among other things, is how one relates to the land.
That’s why the settlers in Palestine, uprooting thousands-of-years-old olive trees, detonating ancient buildings, and filming themselves rampaging through the dusty land in their tanks, will never be able to convince the world’s majority that someone of the land would leave it bare and burnt.
Indigeneity can be easily romanticised, seeing entire nations through a lens that can be infantilising, simplifying, and grossly generalizing. From subhuman to a perfect and permanently gentle human: this takes us to another side of the dehumanisation coin.
I invite you not to romanticise indigeneity, nor to look at it through a purely utilitarian lens, like reminding ourselves that we urgently need to invest in those who steward our most precious rainforests if we want to prevent a complete climate catastrophe. That is all true. But that isn’t all.
When we look around at the state of the world in 2026 and where it seems to be heading if no course correction is imposed, we can use the concept of indigeneity to remind us of something absolutely crucial. That the way we relate to the land, nature, and one another can be different. That capitalism and the commodification of activities, time, and, in the end, our connection to ourselves and one another, is not the only way of being. And that the current dominant direction, if not course-corrected, is taking us all to self-destruction, (at least) ecologically speaking.
Indigenous Peoples on every continent have shown us what resistance means and what it takes: from fighting those bringing death and genocide, to standing up against corporate greed, to demanding environmental protection laws that benefit us all. And as long as we continue living in a world shaped by colonialism, with violence-producing power imbalances intact to this day, the struggles remain.
Now, what will it take for all of us to join them?
As a white lady from Eastern Europe, no matter my family’s roots in this region, I would (absolutely correctly) never use ‘Indigenous’ to describe myself. I am not from a land that was under anything close to what colonised nations had to go through, like genocides and ecocides. But I come from a land of farmers, and from a place where food was and still is grown at home; where we put up birdhouses; where we pick berries in the forest. The smell of smoke will always remind me of the potatoes we would roast after collecting the harvest, and the smell of hay will always bring me back to labouring the fields in the summer. I know it’s not indigeneity. But the connection to the land is not lost.
It took me a lifetime to see – still, as a white woman, an outsider – indigeneity as I see it now (notice I didn’t use the word ‘understand’). And I hope this way of seeing it will continue evolving and wrapping itself in more layers of complexity. I hope to look back at this essay one day, thinking how simplistic my outlook was.
I am very thankful to my colleagues from Thailand, friends from Palestine, and comrades from Peru and Panama, who have shown me different aspects of Indigeneity, or the aspects of struggles, solidarity, and the beauty of this world that I might not have seen otherwise. We might come from very different backgrounds and different combinations of privileges (or lack thereof), yet the lines between the dots of seemingly different struggles suddenly connect; collective liberation becomes much more than a commonly used phrase.
I haven’t found a more powerful tool for anti-oppression than seeing ourselves in others. I think the sooner we truly genuinely do it, the more imminent the course-correction from the path of self-destruction is.
This world is incredibly beautiful and unbearably violent at the same time.
I am grateful and ever-inspired to work towards building a world that is different. To know that it is possible simply because it once was. To know we can reimagine it together – if we actually look at each other and uplift each other. Side by side, as equals, while undoing historical injustices that told us we weren’t.
Happy International Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Let’s learn from and actively engage in the struggles that will liberate us all.
Justina
To support Indigenous rights, I invite you to follow these Indigenous-led organisations: Pawanka Fund and Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, and these organisations who work directly with Indigenous communities: Survival International and Health In Harmony.
To support a tiny but mighty initiative, please follow Ulu Films, an Indigenous filmmakers’ collective that has been empowering Indigenous communities in Panama via workshops, media projects, and fostering Indigenous organising. I had the privilege of collaborating with its brilliant team this year in Panama.
My (video)podcast has taken a symbolic break to demarcate the seasons. If you have been finding value in my work, I invite you to support my completely independent one-woman project by clicking the link below.
If you’re able and willing, I invite you to support the fundraiser that my friend Mahmoud from Gaza and I are running here.
See what I have for you this Northern hemisphere summer: my third workshop on launching a political podcast on August 25, and a group call to talk about how to keep ourselves going in these turbulent times on August 26, 2026.
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