grue , 4 days ago

Believe it or not, I’m not actually trying to troll you here – despite, at this point, you pissing me off with your cutesy obstinance.

You know what? Fuck it. I’ll just get to the point despite your refusal to cooperate:

I can only assume you’re thinking, but refusing to answer, “no, the European-descended people on the Falkland Islands don’t count as indigenous (definition 2) because they were ‘colonists’ and didn’t arrive before themselves.”

In that case, here’s the real point I was trying to get at: what definition of “colonist” applies to those Europeans but not also the Polynesians, without relying on some kind of European exceptionalism? In what way was the Polynesian expansion across the Pacific not an act of colonization, just like what the Europeans were doing in the Falklands? If the implication is that the ability to “colonize” is exclusively an Age-of-Discovery-European thing, or that Polynesians somehow lacked the capacity to “colonize” places because of some “noble savage” bullshit, I’m not buying it!

In other words, I object to that line of thinking not because I’m trying to diminish the Maori’s claim to Aotearoa, but because making Europeans exceptional sells the Polynesians short.

Now, there is another connotation of “colonist:” the kind that is starkly contrasted with “indigenous” in the sense that they’re newcomers who arrive at a place that already has people living there and subjugate them while claiming the “new” territory for the country they came from. In that context, we can definitely talk about how the Europeans who showed up in Aotearoa were “colonists” and the existing Maori population were their “indigenous” victims. That’s definitely a definition that differentiates between the two groups!

…Except that going by that meaning, the Europeans who settled the Falklands couldn’t have been “colonists” because there wasn’t anybody there to subjugate before they showed up. So does that mean European-descended Falkland Islanders do count as “indigenous” (definition 2) after all, since they were the ones who inhabited the place from the earliest times?

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The conclusion I have to draw is this: either both the Polynesian-descended Maori in Aotearoa and the European-descended Falkland Islanders are “indigenous,” or neither of them are.

If you disagree, I would – genuinely! – love to know why.