When water protectors at Standing Rock claim Mní Wičhóni, the Lakota phrase for “water is life,” they are saying that water is sacred because it sustains all forms of life. The Māori say, Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko au, “I am the river and the river is me,” when speaking of the Whanganui River because there is no separation between them and the river.Footnote 1 Amazon Indigenous leaders say that they are the forest that regulates the climate, that they are nature defending itself.Footnote 2 They are defending oneness, the interconnected web of life marked by infinite diversity.Footnote 3 Yet it would be a mistake to reduce their struggles to a romantic preservation of nature. When they defend water, Indigenous peoples are claiming self-determination against the states encroaching on their territories.
Indigenous peoples have much to teach modern societies about relating to nature, yet even more about politics. Nature is an invention of culture, warns Ailton Krenak; there is no nature outside of culture.Footnote 4 The United Nations calls on Indigenous stewardship to limit the climate collapse because their territories sustain most of the world’s remaining biodiversity and biodiversity hotspots.Footnote 5 Yet focusing on environmental care alone can be misguided. It reproduces an invented divide between human and nature in which racialized peoples are treated as disposable nature.Footnote 6 This premise, which omits nature conservation as a predator grabbing Indigenous lands, is a central feature of our world system built on the negation of self-determination for the nations it has come to define as Indigenous.Footnote 7
The water protectors of the Lakota territories in North America have little in common with those of Māori Whanganui nations in the Pacific Ocean. The Terena people, ancestral to the Pantanal, are completely different from the Miccosukee Tribes in the Everglades, even if both guard vast wetlands. These water protectors belong to autonomous nations that inhabit different ecosystems on different continents. They speak different languages and have their own traditional knowledge systems, with distinct philosophies and unique forms of governance. Yet they are all labeled “Indigenous” by various modern states that sit at the UN.
Indigeneity is not a culture and much less a race, not a linguistic or biological feature.Footnote 8 It is a political category that was created by western modernity. Before colonial or modern states labeled them Tribal and Indian during processes of land-grab, people identified as Tikuna on the Amazon River or Kaqchikel by the Atitlan Lake. The concept of indigeneity emerged with modern states, in relation to them and shaped their unfolding.
Indigeneity is a category that matters for what it reveals about the modern states that use it, more than the people called Indigenous. James Baldwin once pushed white America to ask itself why it needed to invent the Negro in the first place, because he is a man, not a Negro.Footnote 9 Indigeneity raises a similar question: why do modern states need to invent the Indian? Indigeneity was invented as modernity’s imagined past by a world-system that hierarchizes life to accumulate nature; a system many call capitalism that has come to order most relations.
Indigeneity is a useful lens to understand why some nations have sovereignty to speak at the UN, and others do not. It sheds light on who owns and who is owned, who has citizenship and who is framed as savage. It shows whose rivers are polluted and where nuclear waste is dumped, which communities are traversed by pipelines, and which have data centers pushed onto them.Footnote 10 It is a category that indicates whose self-determination is land-grabbed and why the liberal institutions of the so-called free world operate through appropriation. Indigeneity matters to understand how we all got here, and how to get out of it.
Indigenous peoples often joke, not jokingly, that they have a few tips to offer about the end of the world. They know about living in times of planetary collapse and recognize the anxieties of this second quarter of the twenty-first century because they have been through similar times. They endured elimination, massive loss of sociobiodiversity, forced relocation, economic breakdown, and political disintegration. They learned to resist and survive in post-apocalyptic conditions, a skill some refer to as survivance. Footnote 11
Indigenous peoples are unsurprised by today’s authoritarian turn because they have endured these very authoritarian practices experimented upon them. As a Native scholar puts it, Indigenous history is the future.Footnote 12 They recognize the infrastructure of the current multidimensional crisis; they know that the roots of what we call “environmental” are in fact political. They know why relations of care and consent matter to sustain the world, not just in its ecological cycles but in its social life as well.
As the global climate collapse deepens and autocracy rises in different regions with greater militarization of the international order, it is ever more urgent to care and remain connected amidst pressures to dehumanize. Indigenous worlds insist on being in relation, whether it is with the land, with ancestors, or with each other. Their struggles are focused on restructuring relations, on replacing economies of extraction with reciprocity, care, and consent.Footnote 13 They invite a politics of relationality, taking time to inhabit a diversity of relations not because they are productive, but because they sustain the fabric of life. To value Indigenous experiences opens conversations on how to relate to others as we engage in public life, staying with the trouble, as a philosopher puts it.Footnote 14 It is about listening to those who experience the world differently, valuing our differences in times of deep polarization.
Indigeneity operates on three levels: as a political identity, as a relation to the state, and as co-constitutive of political modernity. Indigenous peoples work with nature to restore water as much as consent in public life, to enrich everyone’s polities with relations of non-domination centered on sustaining life.
1. A political category
Indigeneity is a lens to understand our modern world. It is not a homogenous identity; it only exists in relation to its outside. Alaska Native Tribes do not share linguistic, cultural, or political backgrounds with Bedouin communities in the Sahara Desert. They only become homogenized as Indigenous peoples in the eyes of states. In fact, the one thing that the multitude of Indigenous peoples across the world have in common is the experience of being invaded, dispossessed, or annexed by different empires or modern states, at different times and with varying forms of conquest. Indigeneity served as Europe’s looking glass: the modern nation-state was defined, then constructed, in relation to an imagined Indigenous outside. This is why indigeneity is a fundamental category to understand how the international system was constituted and how it still operates today.Footnote 15
Indigeneity marks a modern political category that organized the world system. Nobody was Indigenous in the Americas before 1492. As Onyota’a:ka scholar Martin Cannon puts it, “At the time of contact there were no Indians living on Turtle Island—only diverse nations of peoples.”Footnote 16 The millions of people who lived across the Western Hemisphere were Taíno, Dine, Mapuche, Aymara, Onondaga, Chumash, Emberá. What made them Indigenous despite all their differences was the arrival of colonizers. Even after Europeans realized that Columbus had not set foot in the Indies, they kept the label of Indian for people living in what they called the New World—although the continent had civilizations older than Europe.Footnote 17 Europe created its Indians as a tool for producing racial difference, a system that later would normalize hierarchies of humanity, from India to the Americas.Footnote 18 People were othered under the homogenizing category of Indian, then located in Europe’s past. That initial political framing would never cease to be weaponized by various empires to invade, exclude, and dispossess. Nations and peoples across the world with vastly different forms of governance, philosophies, and languages were all subsumed under the single category of Indians through various imperial processes of political formation that unfolded—globally—after 1492.Footnote 19
“Indian” is a broad umbrella category used for the Iñupiat people on the Arctic coast of northern Alaska, the Tzotzil in the mountains of Chiapas, or the Koori in present-day Australia. They share nothing but the experience of being discovered, or rather invaded, by modern settler states. Indigeneity is a colonial identity that was first invented, then mostly imposed, by states. It refers to nations of people who are denied self-determination by invading groups who claim sovereignty over their territories.
Take the case of the indigenization of Hawaiʻi. The Hawaiian Kingdom, an independent nation- state, suffered a US invasion in 1893 that overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani. The foreign power then claimed annexation of the entire archipelago of Hawaiʻi through a Congress resolution in 1898, followed by territorial incorporation in 1900, and then in 1959 declared it its 50th state after an internal vote controlled by the US that did not offer Hawaiians the option of independence.Footnote 20 Recently, the US Department of the Interior created a process allowing Hawaiian self-governing entities to get federal Tribal recognition from the US. This Tribal status reduced a sovereign nation to an Indigenous minority within the settler state, dividing the Hawaiian community between those committed to independence and others leaning towards getting an available form of federal recognition akin to Tribal nations.
What happened to Hawai’i has been ongoing for centuries across the world. It happened to the nearby Ryukyu Kingdom that was forcibly annexed by Japan in 1879, then renamed Okinawa.Footnote 21 It happened to the islands of Aotearoa, which were renamed New Zealand, then annexed by the British Empire. It happened to the Tuva people in southern Siberia, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944. Today, Native and Indigenous scholars recognize in Gaza similar forms of settler colonial elimination, seeing similar genocidal logics of erase-to-replace unfolding in Palestine.Footnote 22
The process of settler colonial invasion produces Indians to appropriate territories by erasing the political autonomy of existing nations. In their public-art project Brasil, terra indigena, Indigenous artists Denilson Baniwa and Jaider Esbell contested that erasure for appropriation by pasting posters across urban Brazil to rename the settler nation as Indigenous territory.Footnote 23
2. A colonial relation
This political category is relational—one is the Indian of a state. Maya Kaqchikel novelist Luis de Lión learned he was Indian when he left his village for the city of Antigua, Guatemala.Footnote 24 Before, he was just a person. In other words, one becomes Indigenous through a civilizational gaze that (de)classifies one’s humanity. Hawaiians are Native American in the gaze of the US settler state that claimed sovereignty over their islands. Māori became Indigenous in the eyes of the British Empire, then New Zealand’s state. Native scholars speak of definitional violence precisely because modern states define who is Indigenous, a categorization embedded in tactics of land grab.
There can be no Indian if there is no state. Indigeneity is relevant for a world politics dominated by states because it operates as an archeology of the state: the presence of Indians indicates the presence of a modern state. They can only exist in reference to each other, as two sides of a coin. Indigeneity functions as the state’s semiotic pair, such as savage and citizen, feminine and masculine.Footnote 25 To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born an Indian; one becomes Indian after being traversed by a state.Footnote 26 Mahmood Mandami puts it this way, “There can be no settler without a native.”Footnote 27 In our book, Canessa and I approach indigeneity as a fluid identity impossible to define in its own terms because it has no internal referent; it is an implied otherness that only exists in relation to states.Footnote 28
This is why indigeneity is so heterogeneous. Maria Saldaña-Portillo says there was never one Indianness but “at least as many as there were European colonial ventures.”Footnote 29 This explains why there are multiple terms to refer to indigeneity. Variations in state-making from one colonial context to another influenced legal categorizations and local experiences over time, with Indian shifting to Native in the US, Tribal in India, Aboriginal in Australia, or First Nations in Canada. In the US alone, there are over 50 different ways of defining indigeneity from the local state level to the federal government.Footnote 30 In Latin America, the term indios led to pueblos indígenas in Ecuador, originarios in lowlands Bolivia, ancestrales in Guatemala, with various connotations attached to ongoing politics of contestation and resistance.
Although indigeneity is often mis-located in the past for being perceived as outside modernity, it is quintessentially modern and continuously shaping politics. In India, the British colonial system established the concept of Scheduled Tribes, which continues to be used alongside other loosely interchangeable terms such as Indigenous and Adivasi depending on sociopolitical context. Tribality gets shaped in the struggles between the state and tribes over resources in everyday public life, one defining the other in political contexts that are contentious, porous, and constantly shifting.Footnote 31 It was British colonialism that introduced the Tribal category, but India’s post-independence state maintained it while setting off new understandings of tribality-and shifting policies. Postcolonial states keep the colonial categories because they still depend on the land grab-and need to deny Tribal claims for self-determination.
As empires, then modern states, categorized peoples as Indian, they simultaneously produced racial formations shaping regimes of dispossession that operated differently depending on whether they sought to appropriate land or labor. In the North American context, Indigenous peoples were racialized through a logic of elimination, with blood quantum rules, narratives of the vanishing Indian, removals, forced assimilation, and genocide to clear the land for settlers.Footnote 32 Settler colonialism sought to eliminate the Natives to appropriate their lands, framing entire territories as wilderness or empty wastelands awaiting civilization, productivity, and development. In contrast, African people were racialized through a logic of labor exploitation, which in the US came with chattel slavery and the one-drop rule, ensuring a constant, hereditary state of enslavement that categorized Blackness as exploitable labor. These distinct racial categorizations worked in complementary ways to disappear some people from their lands while forcing others into bondage. These logics, foundational to settler colonial states, are ongoing, with biological notions of belonging such as DNA ancestry projects seeking to erase political membership and autonomy.Footnote 33
No categorization is neutral. In the Uyghur case, debates on whether China’s repression constitutes a genocide overlook their categorization as a Chinese minority. Framing the Uyghurs as an ethnic minority erases their sovereignty and the Sino-Uyghur settler colonial relation that started with Mao’s military invasion of East Turkestan in 1949.Footnote 34 As China colonized Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongolian territories, autonomous nations were first framed as non-conforming savages, then invented as Chinese minorities. Uyghurs, like Hawaiians, reject minoritization as a form of definitional violence imposed without their consent. They struggle to be recognized as a colonized nation demanding rights to self-determination.
In its many names, indigeneity always refers to a colonial relation of some sort, with a citizen who belongs and an Indian who does not. It is a binary embedded in a subordinating structure, between one sovereign side who owns the land and the other who is owned as nature. Power lies in the ability to define. As Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith puts it, “they came, they saw, they named, they claimed.”Footnote 35 The power of defining who gets to be sovereign or Indigenous still justifies land-grabs, using the façade of legality to enable destructive relations that push the planet ever more toward collapse.
3. Co-constituting political modernity
What gets overlooked is that these Indigenous-State relations have shaped the world system. In their constant push and pull contesting and resisting colonization, Indigenous peoples influenced the birth of modern law, institutionality, and governance. The dispossession of Indigenous bodies and territories funded the emergence of European hegemony in world politics. The silver extracted from Andean mines such as Potosí funded European monarchies to lead their religious wars, and created the material conditions for the monetarization enabling the rise of Western Europe.Footnote 36 Similarly, Indigenous worlds influenced the institutionalization of political modernity—and still do today.
In 1821, settlers rushed to found the modern Republic of Guatemala so that the K’iche’ and Kaqchikel nations would not declare independence before and on their own terms. When the authority of the Spanish crown faded across Ibero-America, the Kaqchikel authorities of Sololá ceased to pay tribute to the Spanish Audiencia of Guatemala. Soon, the neighboring K’iche’ nation of Totonicapán declared independence from Spanish rule, proclaiming a government of their own in 1820. They named Atanasio Tzul as Governor of the Independent Province of Totonicapán and Lucas Aguilar as King of the Indians.Footnote 37 When the Spanish Crown momentarily regained control over these territories, European settlers, fearful of being governed by K’iche’ rule, accelerated a declaration of independence from Spain to form the Republic of Guatemala before the nations they called Indian reorganized a government of their own. Guatemala’s founding charter, co-authored by settler and ecclesiastic members of the Spanish Audiencia, warned that towns such as Tuxtla had started declaring independence and urged a settler declaration of independence to maintain the Christian religious order.Footnote 38
In the United States of America, the institutions famously praised by Alexis de Tocqueville were partly inspired by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois or the Six Nations. The US founding fathers modeled the emerging nation-state on the governing principles of the Haudenosaunee’s Great Law of Peace.Footnote 39 The Haudenosaunee bicameral congress of Elder Brothers and Younger Brothers inspired the Upper and Lower Houses, and the Clan Mothers inspired the US Supreme Court, with members selected by consensus who serve for life and have authority to remove council members—but without women.Footnote 40 Although few US citizens know that history, the US Senate in 1987 officially recognized the influence of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy on the constitution of the US and the development of its democratic institutions, with Congress following in 1988.Footnote 41
Even the US Great Seal adopted Haudenosaunee symbols. Mimicking the seal of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, depicting a cluster of arrows representing member nations to symbolize the power of unity, the newly founded US adopted a seal portraying the eagle clutching 13 arrows, one for each colony. This symbol still stands on the back of the one-dollar bill, and after temporarily disappearing from coins, it made a comeback on the dime under the Trump administration for the nation’s 250th anniversary. Haudenosaunee governance shaped a variety of US institutions, which then traveled the world, inspiring the French Revolution then Latin American states as they declared independence from European monarchies. When the Haudenosaunee women who occupied the highest political ranks in their Confederacy hosted the Seneca Falls Convention of 1850, they inspired generations of settler women to mobilize for the right to vote and influenced the emergence of feminism across borders.Footnote 42
Indigenous worlds contributed more than corn, moccasins, or the protection of nature to modern life. As Indigenous political orders informed, contested, and resisted settler ways, they molded the constitution of modern states. But as modern states adopted democratic forms of governance from Indigenous peoples, most often they organized their liberal institutions to justify the Indigenous land-grab, a paradox scholars term democratic dispossession.Footnote 43 Indigenous resistance endured, forcing settlers to redefine legal systems and bringing empires to their knees.Footnote 44
Western Shoshone historian Ned Blackhawk retells the American Revolution as an Indigenous affair, showing how Native military and diplomatic power forced the British to recognize lands west of Appalachia as Native territories.Footnote 45 This British concession prohibited further settlements, fueling the resentment of settler colonialists and starting a causal chain leading to the US Revolution—and reshaping the British Empire. This is why legal scholars argue that the sovereignty of modern states must be understood, at least in part, as a counterclaim to the constant push-back of Indigenous polities.Footnote 46
Indigenous experiences matter for world history because they have shaped public life and culture for centuries. There is something wrong with a canon of political theory unable to account for indigeneity.
They still do today. The emergence of laws on the rights of nature is deeply influenced by Indigenous worldviews. As Indigenous water protectors stand for rivers, they influence public opinion, policy, and legal sentences. In El Salvador, water defenders allied with various social sectors, pushing Congress to proclaim the first national mining ban in the world.Footnote 47 In Ecuador, Indigenous advocacy successfully inscribed the rights of nature in the 2008 Constitution, setting an international precedent that inspired more legislation on the rights of nature worldwide.Footnote 48 From Colombia to Canada, Spain to India, courts are recognizing the rights of rivers and animals as sentient beings with legal personhood. One of the most emblematic cases is New Zealand granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River. The 2017 Te Awa Tupua legal settlement comes after 160 years of intergenerational Māori resistance against the British Empire, then New Zealand’s democratic state, to defend their relations of kinship and responsibility with the Whanganui River.Footnote 49 These cases do more than include Indigenous rights in modern law; they represent a deeper ontological shift in what forms of life- and relations- can exist in the eyes of the law.
As jurisprudence on the rights of nature reshapes relations of extraction towards relations of care, it influences elections and defines public policy. In Greenland, the small anti-mine Indigenous party Inuit Ataqatigiit won a majority in parliament for contesting a uranium mine in the mountains of Kvanefjeld.Footnote 50 In Ecuador, younger voters who grew up with a constitution recognizing the rights of nature have passed three referendums to protect water against extraction: a national one to leave oil underground in the Amazon’s megadiverse Yasuní and two provincial ones protecting mountains from metal industrial mining.
Indigenous values inform public debate, shape how democracies operate, and expand what futures we are able to imagine. Maybe it is a subtle revolution quietly reshaping the world system.Footnote 51
4. Indigeneity at Alligator Alcatraz
As a political identity, as a relation to the state, and as co-constitutive of political modernity, Indigeneity shapes public life: take the case of Alligator Alcatraz. The detention center was built in 2025 for Trump’s mass detention and deportation program in the wetlands of Florida’s Everglades, designed to dehumanize migrants and asylum seekers. The facility immediately became infamous for its cruelty and lack of transparency. Amnesty International reported on the inhumane punishment with cruel rights violations amounting to torture, whereas US media faced heavily restricted access and five Florida congressmembers were denied entry to inspect the facility.Footnote 52 Yet with all the uproar Alligator Alcatraz generated, it was a lawsuit by the Miccosukee Tribe and environmental allies that triggered its collapse.
Alligator Alcatraz was built on Miccosukee ancestral lands, a few miles from the Miccosukee Indian Village and within Big Cypress National Preserve, a sacred Tribal and federally protected area in the heart of the Everglades. The Miccosukee nation sued the federal and state governments, alleging irreparable damage to the ecosystem of their ancestral homelands. Tribal member Troy Sanders said the ancestral territory “is meant for our tribes, it protects life, it shields it. It’s not meant to detain life.”Footnote 53 In court, Tribal leaders argued that the facility threatened 80 percent of the Tribe’s homes, two schools, and the Tribal government building.
The federal court ruled that any habitat loss constitutes direct harm to the Tribe. In her ruling, the judge discussed Alligator Alcatraz’s irreparable harm to the Miccosukee Tribe, its access to water supplies, and its existence as inseparable from the wetlands.Footnote 54 The ruling prohibited authorities from admitting additional detainees and gave Florida officials 60 days to start dismantling the mass detention center. Even if the ruling was later appealed, the Miccosukee Tribe’s lawsuit shaped the battle over Alligator Alcatraz. What interrupted Trump’s most emblematic detention project was not human rights or immigration law, but Indigenous claims over their homelands. By the time Alligator Alcatraz was completely dismantled in June 2026, after months of litigation, scrutiny, and public pressure, it was undeniable that Tribal claims had shaped the outcome. Indigeneity continues to influence, inspire, and restructure public life during the Trump administration, just as it did through centuries of settler colonial invasion.
Indigeneity is an enduring presence.Footnote 55 When the Miccosukee Tribe sues the US government, they are exercising self-determination, not just resisting environmental harm. They are claiming authority over their ancestral homelands, as they have always done. They are replacing coercion with consent, pursuing politics of non-domination for their people, the homelands, and public life. The Miccosukee Tribe resisted coercion, both in the wetlands and in federal policy, to shield life. Water is the central force sustaining all life, carrying knowledge and political consent; it is at once method and theory.Footnote 56
5. Self-determination
Indigeneity matters as a reflection on the past, to recognize what the global order is made of. It matters as an invitation to imagine a future with forms of governance that value autonomy diversity in public life.Footnote 57
Sámi scholar Rauna Kuokkanen insists that the most important contribution of Indigenous worlds is to recenter global governance towards principles of self-determination. Indigenous claims for consultation and consent on projects affecting their territories—be it a pipeline, an industrial metal mine, or a detention center—are reclaiming nature as much as democracy. They seek to replace centuries of coercive extraction that commodifies life with a governance of autonomy and care centered on water. That entails relations based on consent, rather than autocracy, to restructure societies towards non-domination.Footnote 58 Indigenous self-determination promotes a governance based on responsibility to land and future generations. The claims of water protectors worldwide are not just about water; they are fundamental to resisting the pressures of unitary, centralized authoritarian models spreading globally. Self-determination invites a public life centered on reciprocity, seeking freedoms that are inherently relational and mutually constitutive.
Recognizing indigeneity as a political category relational to states and co-constitutive of political modernity should not result in more complicit erasure of settler colonial structures. Peoples around the world are engaging indigeneity to claim self-determination over their homelands even as they question and resist state recognition, amidst ongoing forms of dispossession. It should lead to an understanding of Indigenous relations to water as deeply political, to recognize the powerful legacy of Indigenous political and legal thought, which predates invasion and capitalist worldviews.
The Miccosukee Tribe taught how to protect all life, not just biodiversity, to stand for each other and defend diversity in the face of fascist authoritarianism. We can learn to resist the logic of elimination with Indigenous peoples, to care for life beyond the human, as they have always done.Footnote 59 The task is no longer to protect Indigenous peoples from the ongoing destruction produced by modern states, but to recognize our interdependence—and that Indigenous political worlds have much to teach us about how to survive political collapse.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: M.P.; Formal analysis: M.P.; Investigation: M.P.; Methodology: M.P.; Writing - original draft: M.P.; Writing - review & editing: M.P.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Open access
