Editing Openai/693bdacb-35a8-8012-9fdf-153296aba70f (section)

=== Assistant: Because indigeneity is not a neutral anthropological category; it’s a post-WWII legal–political construct designed for … ===
Because indigeneity is not a neutral anthropological category; it’s a post-WWII legal–political construct designed for a specific historical problem.

Key reasons it doesn’t extend to Europe:
# Functional definition, not temporal priority In international law (UNDRIP, ILO 169), “indigenous” means pre-colonial peoples subordinated by an external settler state, not “who was here first.” Europe lacks a durable settler/subject dichotomy imposed from outside.
# Continuity of sovereignty European peoples generally retained or reconstituted political sovereignty on their own territory. Indigeneity frameworks exist to address peoples who lost sovereignty and remain governed by non-native elites.
# Colonizer framing of modern history Europe is treated as the source of colonialism, not its victim. The category is asymmetrical by design; extending it to Europeans collapses the moral architecture of post-colonial theory.
# Ethnogenesis vs. displacement narrative European populations are seen as products of continuous ethnogenesis (migration, mixing, conquest among peers), not as peoples frozen in a pre-conquest state displaced by outsiders.
# Power politics Indigeneity functions as a compensatory status for minorities without state power. Europeans are global majorities in capital, institutions, and historical authorship, so the category is withheld regardless of ancestry.
# Explicit exceptions prove the rule Groups like the Sámi are recognized as indigenous precisely because they fit the model: non-state peoples subordinated within European states. Most Europeans do not.

Bottom line: indigeneity is a remedial doctrine, not a universal principle. It applies where a people is politically dominated on its ancestral land by a foreign civilizational project. Europe doesn’t fit the use-case, so it’s excluded by definition, not accident.