Indigenisation

Summary

In Lorenzo Veracini’s account, the process by which a settler collective makes itself indigenous to the settler locale — essential to establishing a legitimate settler claim, and prevented by Recolonisation (The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, PDF p.17 / printed p.16).

“Indigenisation is essential to the establishment of a legitimate settler claim. Thus, settlers aim to own the land, but also to own it as indigenous peoples would, which is ultimately the only way of claiming a radical and original title” — that is, of not owning it as a result of fraudulent transactions or forcible dispossession, the two most frequently overlapping (PDF p.17 / printed p.16).
Failure to fully indigenise vis-à-vis those who have not yet moved to the settler locale is rarely good news for a settler colonial project; the reverse is also true, in that failure to indigenise creates the conditions of possibility for recolonisation to become operative (PDF p.18 / printed p.17).
On Zionist attempts to collectively indigenise, note 27 points to Gabriel Piterberg on the Canaanites and on Ben-Gurion reading the Book of Joshua, and to Veracini’s Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), pp. 17-32, on indigenisation as a fundamental trait of settler colonial discursive orders (PDF p.17, note 27).
The 2011 Absorption Ministry campaign and the Jewish Agency’s shift to temporary visits are read as signs of a collective not healthily indigenising: “This is not how a healthily indigenising settler colonial collective positions itself” (PDF p.19 / printed p.18).

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aliases