Thread by @Tyler_A_Harper

The reason people scoff is that, at least in academia, "indigeneity" has become a magic word that is evacuated of both historical and cultural specificity, flattens all differences between indigenous groups, and is accompanied by exoticizing appeals to pre-rational "wisdom" 1/

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/1759603393088090130

Indigenous people are reduced to vehicles for timeless, pre-historical knowledge – wish fulfillment for white progressives dreaming of a prelapsarian age before capital and industry – a form of sentimental racism that excludes indigenous people from both history and modernity. 2/

I've been in the environmental humanities for a decade, and in the last five years I've seen a HUGE shift in how (mostly white) people talk about/teach indigenous texts/ideas. It's not just "land acknowledgement" nonsense. It's magical negro bullshit but for native people. 3/

We spend endless amounts of time talking about "indigenous wisdom" and pretending that it's a magic bullet that will solve capitalism, climate change, and everything else. Just like the magical negro, magical indigenous people will be our spiritual guides in a time of crisis. 4/

The focus is rarely on indigenous communities, their cultures or their homes or their problems. Instead, the question always seems to be how can indigenous ideas – ripped out of context, cobbled together from a hodgepodge of different tribes and traditions – solve OUR problems 5/

I think traditional ecological knowledge should be taken seriously and deserves a place in higher education or left politics. But in my experience it rarely is taken seriously. So yeah, I often roll my eyes at the people who invoke "indigeneity" because they often deserve it.