Belonging to Place
Indigenous Place-Thought, National Conservatism, and the Ethnostate Debate
What is the relationship between place and identity - particularly ethnic identity? This question has been troubling me for some time. My clearest response is that any straightforward relationship between a group defined ethnically - as a coherent body of people with a coherent set of beliefs and practices often referred to as “culture” – and a clearly bounded portion of the Earth’s surface, is deeply problematic. Most obviously, neither the body of people, nor the portion of land, are likely to be coherent or clearly defined. Dividing the population of the world up into groups, either through some recourse of nature (race, phenotypes and the like) or to shared history, is almost always open to question. Such divisions are not arbitrary, rather they are divisions which deliberately serve sets of interests and deny others - almost the opposite of arbitrary. The same can be said of the division of the world into bounded spaces - most obviously nation-states. While some, such as bioregionalists, claim a natural basis for such divisions, they are clearly a matter of artifice. Recent reading and world events have led me to return to this core question of place and identity through three related additional questions: 1) What kinds of relationships can (or should) exist between a human collective and a particular place or landscape? 2) By what criteria do we decide that those relationships are legitimate? And 3) How do power and historical violence shape, distort, or invalidate claims of belonging?
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My intellectual and political commitment to the separation of place from coherent ethnic identities has long been troubled by the claims of historically oppressed Indigenous peoples to places and landscapes that have been forcibly removed from them. Forceful removal and extermination have led to intergenerational trauma. Even without forceful removal, the process of land degradation can lead to solastalgia – a form of homesickness experienced without leaving home, entangled with profound ecological grief. Recently a paper by Vanessa Watts - a Mohawk and Anishinaabe Bear Clan Indigenous scholar and sociologist based at McMaster University has made me pause for thought. The paper is titled ‘Indigenous place-thought and agency among humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!).’[1] The paper starts with the story of Sky Woman which is recounted as follows:
“According to Haudenosaunee, Sky Woman fell from a hole in the sky. John Mohawk (2005) writes of her journey towards the waters below. On her descent, Sky Woman fell through the clouds and air towards water below. During her descent, birds could see this falling creature and saw she could not fly. They came to her and helped to lower her slowly to waters beneath her. The birds told Turtle that she must need a place to land, as she possessed no water legs. Turtle rose up, breaking through the surface so that Sky Woman could land on Turtle’s back. Once landed, Sky Woman and Turtle began to go form the earth, the land becoming an extension of their bodies.” (21)
This story is similar to other origin stories in North America among Indigenous and First Nation people. Watts’s challenge to me is her assertion that these are accounts of events that “took place”. “This is not lore, myth, or legend. These histories are not longer versions of “and the moral of the story is…”. This is what happened.” (21). My problem is that I do not believe that “this is what happened”.
Watts describes the kind of thought evident in this account as “place-thought” “the non-distinctive space where place and thought are never separated because they never could be or can be separated. Place-thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.” (21). As a scholar of place and someone interested in the relationship between place and knowledge, I am fascinated by Watts’s paper. My mind immediately makes links to kinds of non-Indigenous thought (also place-thought but rarely described as such) such as ecology and the more recent turn to the “more-than-human” in geography and beyond – all forms of thought that question the Western insistence on the specialness and separateness of the human. I think of the kinds of origin stories that Watts writes of as kinds of metaphors about how we might understand humans as entangled with other forms of life and, indeed, the non-living. I am drawn to one passage where she writes
“The agency that place possesses can be thought of in a similar way that Western thinkers locate agency in human beings. It follows that if, as Indigenous peoples, we are extensions of the very land we walk upon, then we have an obligation to maintain communication with it. …if we do not care for the land we run the risk of losing who we are as Indigenous peoples.” (23)
Watts writes about the loss of identity and physical displacement enforced through colonialism that redistributes agency away from the Indigenous human place nexus and towards new forms of power emanating from elsewhere. I find this compelling, yet, despite this, I do not believe, like Watts, that “this is what happened”.
If I suspend my disbelief in “this is what happened” for a while, however, new possibilities emerge. I see land as a form of relation among all living and non-living things rather than a resource, I see how agency is distributed and more-than-human, I see how obligations between people and place are reciprocal rather than one-way. Finally I see how thought and theories can never be separated from place. All thought is place-thought.
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What happens when a similar appeal to the tight connections of people and place comes not from an Indigenous scholar, but from the future Vice-President of the most powerful nation on earth?
At the 2024 Republican National Convention JD Vance made a claim about what he believed constituted American identity and belonging. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future” he claimed, “It is, in short, a nation”. He illustrated this claim with reference to a cemetery in Kentucky where seven generations of his own family were buried.
Now. Now, that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.[2]
Here, Vance claims a connection to place expanding back into time is what makes America. Not a set of ideas framed in the Constitution but multi-generational connection to the soil. Vance’s arguments are central to a movement in the US known as National Conservatism - a movement that moves away from the form of Conservatism based on free markets and neoliberalism and back to, arguably, a more traditional form of Conservatism rooted in inter-generational traditions and continuity - on the idea of “conserving”.
There are many many ways that Indigenous Place Thought and National Conservatism are different - not least the very clear differences in power between First Nations people who have had their land stolen and colonized, and largely White Protestant people who were and are the colonized. The fact that Vance’s cemetery is the cemetery of unwelcome immigrants on stolen land never seems to become part of the equation. Such an observation is clearly way too “woke” to be a welcome one.
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A third example of debate about the connections between place (the land, landscape) and group identity comes from the longstanding struggle over Israel and Palestine and has been brought to the fore over recent discussions about the right of a state to exist. This is a generalized version of the question over whether critics recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist. The UN rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, commenting on the ongoing war crimes and genocidal violence in Gaza[3] was asked if she recognized Israel’s right to exist. Her response was more general, noting that in her view- no state has a right to exist - they either exist or they do not. [4]The idea that a state has the right to exist is a reflection of the idea that coherent group of people, usually sharing ethnicity, religion, or shared history, should be mapped on to territory. That a people should have a place. There is certainly no legal right for a state to exist – the claim is a moral and political one. The claim in Israel, of course, is that Jewish national self-determination is necessary as a measure of self-defense after thousands of years of exile and persecution as well as contemporary antisemitism and the stated aim of some near neighbours to erase Israel from the map. Many would also point to the longstanding presence of Jews in what is now Israel and Palestine as well as Biblical/historical claims to the land that is now Israel and Palestine (often called by their historical names of Judea and Samaria by those who insist that it is Jews who have been dispossessed from land that is rightly theirs). Indeed, there is a Judea and Samaria sovereignty movement and the claim is made that Judea and Samaria were part of the historic homeland of the Jewish people from 1200 BC onwards. The area is now known as the West Bank and is home to Palestinians in the increasingly widely recognized state of Palestine.
For their part, Palestinians also point to their indigeneity to the area and their ongoing dispossession from traditional homelands since the formation of Israel at the end of the British Mandate in 1948. As with Jews, Palestinians have several narratives linking them to the land going back thousands of years and even to shared ancestry with the Jews. Questions of who is most tied to the land are a key part of ongoing struggle. This was evidenced by Benjamin Netenyahu’s erroneous claim in 2019 that “A new study of DNA recovered from an ancient Philistine site in the Israeli city of Ashkelon confirms what we know from the Bible – that the origin of the Philistines is in southern Europe. ... The Palestinians’ connection to the Land of Israel is nothing compared to the 4,000-year connection that the Jewish people have with the land.”[5]Philistines and Palestinians are not the same thing. The important point here though is that claims must be made and remade to multi-generational, deeply historical, ties to the soil.
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The arguments (and bloodshed) over belonging leads me to spiral back to Watts’ discussion of Indigenous Place-Thought. She uses an origin myth to make claims about place and belonging and asks us to believe it. How do we decide whose land-story is the one to be believed in the case of Israel and Palestine? If we believe each story literally and follow Watts’ logic then both Jews and Palestinians run the risk of “losing who they are” if they are either removed from the land, or have the land changed so much under them that they are effectively disconnected. If we return to Vance’s account of a Kentucky cemetery as proof of belonging, then we might ask what happens when two groups of people have long buried their dead in the same “soil”?
I remain sceptical of claims that link an ethnic group to a bounded place. I am sympathetic to Watts’ story because it teaches me new things and because Indigenous and First Nations peoples have quite clearly had their land stolen from them – in part so that Kentucky settlers can be buried in family cemeteries. But if I am happy to learn from Watts’ stories, and more generally happy to support Indigenous claims to “land back”, then why am I less sympathetic to other claims to ethnostates for instance? I would be just as suspicious of a Palestinian version of an ethnostate as I am of Israel as one. Believing stories about links between people and place has material consequences including access to and ownership of resources, legal jurisdiction, and the “legitimate” use of lethal force. Believing stories about belonging has consequences.
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My suspicion of simple mappings of people onto place starts as an academic one. Places and peoples cannot straightforwardly be identified and defined in ways that have impermeable borders. When people in the past have attempted to do this it has often ended badly. But I do think some sense of “belonging” is important. So, what might an acceptable version of belonging look like?
First, any notion of belonging, Watts teaches us, much include reciprocal obligation where the land and things on the land are also stakeholders in a more-than-human process of place making.
Second, and connected to this, forms of place belonging should include the consent of a place’s current living human inhabitants – otherwise it becomes dispossession.
Third, there is a need to account for history. Repair is needed for the historically dispossessed so that they can be made whole again. This might involve reparations, the possibility of return, and forms of shared sovereignty.
Fourth, and following the need for reciprocity, some form of environmental, social, and cultural sustainability should be at the centre of considerations so that a claim of belonging does not destroy that which it claims to love.
All of this is of course a tangle of complications. Honouring ancestors should not go hand in hand with evicting neighbours. Such a task might be less about origin stories, national mythologies, or modern forms of citizenship rights, and more about what we choose to do, together, in the places we share.
[1] Vanessa Watts, (2013) Indigenous place-thought and agency among humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2/1 https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/issue/view/1440
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jd-vance-speech-rnc-vp-trump-b2581857.html
[3] According to United Nations Commission of Enquiry https://www.un.org/unispal/document/commission-of-inquiry-report-genocide-in-gaza-a-hrc-60-crp-3/
[5] https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2019-10-21/ty-article/.premium/magic-or-a-trap-dna-changes-study-of-the-past/0000017f-dec6-d3a5-af7f-feee44b00000
Thank you for all this - lots of fascinating things to ponder. My general thoughts on the topic align with your conclusions, though I still struggle with the general tendency of most conversations to talk about belonging as a sort of natural right, which is imbued with a sense of religiosity / spirituality / meaning / a teleological understanding of existence. The elision between historical fact and national or ethnic myth that you discuss here extends beyond "what is truth" and "what is reality", I think, to a question of the ideological impulses behind the explanations given for facts (especially before scholars started considering bias) and the ideological impulses behind which of those explanations become widely accepted and turned into narrative fact.
For example, while I agree that history and the "historically dispossessed" must be taken into consideration, that simple statement is covering so much complexity.
One reason I think you (and lots of people) have an easier time accepting Indigenous claims to American land than either Israeli or Palestinian claims is that the histories of each are so different. For Indigenous people, there's no question - there was no interruption of their peoples living on this land, if "land" is interpreted broadly to mean the Americas. Of course, individual nations, tribes, and clans were forced to move from their then-current places to entirely foreign places, but in the general public perception, Indigenous people have lived in "America" for so long without interruption that it's nearly impossible to say they don't have a historical claim to the land.
But in Israel and Palestine, neither group had a steady or consistent presence in the land over the past 2000 years. As in Europe, the Middle East has seen groups of peoples bound by ethnicity, religion, or other identities move around quite a lot, both willingly and unwillingly. (While Western minds tend to see Indigenous peoples in the Americas as one large group even though that is far from the truth, we see more difference between groups in Europe and the Middle East, I think.) So accounting for history here gets more complicated, and people point to particular moments in history to bolster all kinds of arguments about claims to the land, and a key point is when the narrative starts and stops. If we consider the last 200 years, history says one thing; if we consider the past 2000, history says another thing; and if we consider the past 4000 years, yet another.
And here we also have a split between history and mythology, or we should have a split but usually don't. The biggest Jewish claim to the land is the Bible, and isn't that the same as the origin myths you struggle to accept from Watts?
I've already written way more than I intended (I started with the intention of writing 3-5 lines!) so just one more point:
The connection of people to a land is often talked about in terms of how well a group is "suited" to the land. Connections are often made linking ethnic groups to specific characteristics based on the environment of their land of origin. I don't think that's used as an argument for the continued connection of a people to a land, but it's an assumption often taken for granted. (I heard versions of this in my Haredi childhood home, in which God gave certain groups features to help them live in their specific environments.) That assumption is also often an underpinning of celebration of ethnic groups. But we know that direction of causation is definitely not so simple, and that these traits are a combination of nature, culture, and history. We also know that for the majority of pre-history, humans were not tied to any one place, though they may have limited their range to one environment.
So to my mind, any claim of a people to a land is based on such a huge mountain of ideological assumptions built up over the centuries and doesn't make any sense. Like you say at the end of this piece, it has to be more about "what we choose to do, together, in the places we share," but I think if humanity wanted to get to that stage, we'd have to undo thousands of years of accumulated thinking that's now entrenched in the way children are socialized to understand the world.
I recommend tp you the complex history of the Puebloans of New Mexico and the 19 Pueblos that remain. And the origin stories related to the Grand Canyon that are not necessarily historically accurate but captivating nonetheless. I wonder if your narrative would be shifted beyond generic indigenous analysis upon further review..