In Walla Walla, as I move around in that geography, I always think about how people lived in that same place before me, moving with the seasons, using the geography and the ecology to their advantage yet never overstepping. I look at the rivers and think about how small groups would live along their banks, trade along the rivers, move into the basin and back up into the valleys and hills. Season after season, century after century, millennium after millennium. In contrast, it seems highly unlikely that our current way of life will last even a tenth of that time. This isn't going to be a lamentation on our modern, obviously unsustainable, economic and political system. It's more about the linguistic idea of indigeneity. From a thoughtful, but ignorant novice in the subject.
I've taken my habit of thinking about geography and indigeneity from Walla Walla to Chile. In the part of the Chile where I'm living now, Vina del Mar, the indigenous people are the Picunche, a subgroup of the Mapuche. Before Spanish colonialism, the Mapuche lived in the central and southern valleys bordered to the north by desert, to the east by the Andes, to the west by the ocean and to the south by the fjords of Patagonia. Estimates are that the Mapuche have lived in this part of the world for at least 5000 years.
The Picunche Mapuche lived along the coast here. They fished, farmed and traded. Evidence of boat use goes back at least 1000 years. In addition to canoes, they built rafts using inflated sea-lion hides. They were not nomadic. They had fixed settlements with farms, irrigation systems and roads.
For at least 5000 years, the Mapuche were not indigeneous. They just were. So why are they called indigenous now? (A lot of these musings come from my long thinking about this in the context of Walla Walla and the Umatilla, Walla Walla and Cayuse tribes there.)
The word "indigenous" was not needed until another group of people with a different culture came to the same geographic area. This happens all the time in language. An idea doesn't need a word until another idea competes with it. The word for "blue" often appears late in the development of a language and typically only appears when the culture develops the ability to dye things blue. Then, suddenly, people have the option of the "red" shirt or the "blue" shirt and a word, "blue", is needed.
When a new group of people encroaches on the territory of an existing group of people, a word is needed, so a word is invented (or words). Indigenous, native, aboriginal, "indian". Often the words are pejorative, e.g. redskin, injun, buck, savage, heathen.
Mapuche means "people of the earth". That word didn't exist before the 19th century. Why would the Mapuche call themselves the Mapuche? They were just people (the word for people is "che"). Before colonialism, if there was a gathering of a lot of people in a Mapuche community, one person would probably just say to another, "Man, there are a lot of 'che' here tonight!"
If intelligent aliens arrived on Earth, I suspect that in pretty short order we'd all be "earthlings". Then, the aliens would be at a concert saying, "Man, there are a lot of earthlings here tonight!"
Also interesting to note, while there were many subgroups of people living in central Chile prior to the arrival of the Spanish, they are all now collectively known as the Mapuche. That collective noun didn't exist prior to colonization.
P.S. Arguably, intelligent aliens are already here in the form of AI. What does that make us humans? Meatbags? Fleshlings?
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Enjoy the sunset, earthlings:
