You ever notice how certain words act like a tactical nuke in a debate? You drop them, and the whole conversation just stops because everyone is suddenly terrified of being on the wrong side of a moral boundary. It is like the air gets sucked out of the room, and suddenly you are not talking about policy or history anymore; you are talking about the very right of a people to exist.
It is the linguistic equivalent of a checkmate, or at least people want it to be. And the word of the decade for that is definitely indigenous. It has become the ultimate trump card in modern political discourse. If you can claim that label, you have the moral high ground. If you are labeled the opposite—the settler, the colonist—you are essentially cast as the villain in a story that started centuries before you were born.
It really is. Today’s prompt from Daniel is about this exact word, specifically how it is used as a weapon in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but also how it functions globally, from the Great Plains of North America to the halls of the United Nations. Daniel is asking us to look past the slogans and ask what being indigenous actually means in twenty twenty-six. Is it a biological fact? A legal status? Or just a really effective political tool?
Herman Poppleberry here, and I have been waiting for someone to ask this because the deeper you go into the legal and genetic literature, the more you realize that the foundation of this entire global debate is built on a term that nobody can actually define. We are using a word to decide the fate of nations, yet we cannot even agree on what the word means.
Wait, really? We have entire international bodies and academic departments dedicated to indigenous studies. We have the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. How can there be no formal definition?
It is a deliberate vacuum, Corn. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, which was adopted back in two thousand seven, intentionally avoided a formal definition. They use a bunch of criteria like self-identification and historical continuity, but they never actually say, this is the line. If you cross it, you are indigenous; if you do not, you are a settler.
That seems like a massive oversight for a document that is supposed to govern land rights and international law. Why leave it so vague?
Because if you define it too strictly, you exclude groups that everyone agrees are indigenous, like certain nomadic tribes in Africa or the Sami in Scandinavia who might not fit a rigid "first-in-time" mold. But if you define it too broadly, then suddenly half the world can claim indigenous status and the political power of the label evaporates. It is a political choice to keep it fuzzy. If everyone is indigenous, no one is special.
So it is a functional vacuum. And because the law will not fill it, the activists have. In the context of the Middle East, the narrative we hear most often in the West is that Jews are European colonialists who showed up in the nineteen-forties and Palestinians are the sole indigenous people. But then you have Jews who point to three thousand years of history and say, we were here before the term Palestinian even existed. It is the ultimate game of historical King of the Hill.
And Daniel’s point about the regress problem is the kicker. If the yardstick is who was there first, where do you stop? Do we stop at the British Mandate? The Ottoman Empire? The Byzantine era? The Roman conquest? If you go back far enough, are we just arguing about which group of hunter-gatherers displaced the other? If we go back to the Bronze Age, the Canaanites were there. But who was there before them? At what point does the clock start ticking for "indigeneity"?
It feels like we are trying to use a fixed point in time to justify a modern political outcome. But before we get into the messy politics of the regress problem, I want to look at the science. You have been digging into these recent genetic studies, Herman, and I think that is where the binary of native versus settler really starts to fall apart. If the argument is that Jews are just "Europeans," the DNA should show that, right?
The science is fascinating and, frankly, it makes both sides of the extremist camps very uncomfortable. There was a landmark study from the Technion and ResearchGate that came out between twenty twenty-four and early twenty twenty-six that performed a quantitative paleogenomic analysis. They compared modern populations to Iron Age Levantine samples—actual DNA from people who lived in the region three thousand years ago.
And what did the DNA say? Did it confirm the "European invader" narrative?
Not even close. It said that the purity narrative is a myth on both sides. Modern Palestinians derive about eighty-one to eighty-seven percent of their ancestry from Bronze Age Levantines. They are deeply, deeply rooted in that soil. They are the descendants of the people who stayed, who converted, who adapted over millennia. But here is the part that blows the European colonist argument out of the water. Ashkenazi Jews—the ones often called "white Europeans"—show between thirty-seven and sixty-five percent Levantine ancestry.
So even the Jews coming from Poland or Germany are, at a minimum, one-third to two-thirds Middle Eastern by blood?
And it is even more pronounced when you look at the paternal lines. Over seventy percent of Jewish men and about fifty percent of Arab men share the same Y-chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors in the Levant within the last few thousand years. A twenty twenty-four Technion study concluded that ninety percent of all Jews, regardless of where they lived in the diaspora—whether it was Yemen, Morocco, or Russia—are genetically linked to the Levant.
So the idea that an Ashkenazi Jew is just a Pole who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages is scientifically bankrupt.
It is completely unsupported by the data. We are talking about a shared heritage where both groups share more than fifty percent of their ancestry with Bronze Age Canaanites. This was confirmed by a twenty twenty Tel Aviv University study that matched both groups to ninety-plus ancient samples from the region. When people call Jews European colonialists, they are ignoring the fact that those Jews were essentially a Levantine population that experienced a massive genetic bottleneck in Southern Europe and then moved north. They kept their genetic signature for two thousand years.
It is incredible that the DNA can stay that distinct over two millennia. But it also highlights what I call the purity trap. If we say Palestinians are indigenous because they are eighty-seven percent Levantine and Jews are "less" indigenous because they are sixty percent, we are essentially using the logic of ethnonationalism. We are measuring blood quantums to decide who has a right to exist in a space. That feels like a very dark road to go down, Herman.
It mirrors some of the worst ideologies of the twentieth century. If you require a hundred percent genetic purity to be "indigenous," then almost no one on Earth qualifies. The reality is that both groups are indigenous to the same small patch of land. They are literal cousins fighting over the family home. But in the academic world, the genetic reality often gets ignored in favor of the settler-colonial framework. This is where we move from biology to sociology, and specifically to a guy named Patrick Wolfe.
Patrick Wolfe. I keep hearing his name in these debates. He seems to be the patron saint of the movement to frame Israel as a colonial project.
Patrick Wolfe—pronounced Wool-fee—was an Australian scholar who coined the phrase "settler colonialism is a structure, not an event." His argument was that in places like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the goal of the settler was not just to extract resources like a traditional colonist—think of the British in India—but to replace the indigenous population entirely.
And activists are applying that to Israel. They say the Zionists arrived to replace the locals, therefore it is a settler-colonial project, end of story.
The problem is that Wolfe’s framework was designed for the Anglosphere. It was designed for the British coming to Australia or the Americans pushing west. It does not account for a group like the Jews who were returning to their ancestral homeland. In Wolfe’s world, a settler has a home country to go back to. If the British failed in Australia, they still had England. If the Jews failed in Israel, they had nowhere. They were not an extension of a foreign empire; they were a displaced indigenous group reconstituting themselves. This is what scholars like Lorenzo Veracini struggle with—how do you categorize a "settler" who is actually a returning native?
That is the diaspora indigeneity question. Can you be indigenous to a place you have not lived in for two thousand years? If the answer is no, then indigeneity has an expiration date. And if it has an expiration date, what is it? Five hundred years? Two hundred? If the Lakota Sioux were expelled from the Black Hills today and could not return for two thousand years, would they lose their status as indigenous to that land?
Most people who support indigenous rights would say no, their connection to the land is spiritual, historical, and genetic. But for some reason, that same logic is often denied to the Jewish people. It is a double standard that Daniel pointed out in his prompt. If we accept that the connection to the land is what defines indigeneity, then the length of the exile shouldn't matter as much as the continuity of the identity.
But let’s flip it, because we have to be fair here. If we say the Jews are indigenous because of a three-thousand-year-old connection, does that mean they have the right to displace the people who have been living there for the last thirteen hundred years? Because that is the Palestinian argument. They say, we do not care about your ancient history; we were here yesterday, and our grandfathers built these houses. Their indigeneity is based on continuous presence, not just ancient origin.
This is why the term "dual indigeneity" is starting to gain traction in twenty twenty-five and twenty twenty-six, especially in more moderate circles. It is the acknowledgement that two things can be true at once. The Jews are returning to their indigenous roots, and the Palestinians have become indigenous through centuries of continuous habitation and culture. The conflict isn't between a native and a stranger; it's between two natives with competing claims. But as you said, that doesn't solve the land dispute. It just makes it more tragic.
While the science is clear, the politics are anything but. Let’s pivot to how this plays out in a different legal system—the United States. Daniel mentioned Native Americans, and the contrast is striking. In the US, we have a very different legal structure for what it means to be indigenous.
The US is a fascinating case because we actually have treaties. The US government recognized tribes as sovereign nations. Of course, the government then proceeded to break almost every one of those treaties, but the legal framework still exists. In twenty twenty-five and twenty twenty-six, we have seen some massive shifts in how this is being handled. It is not just about rhetoric anymore; it is about actual land being moved.
You mentioned the Spirit Lake Nation earlier. What happened there?
In early twenty twenty-five, the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota regained about ten thousand acres from the Fish and Wildlife Service. And there was that bill to transfer the Shawnee Indian Mission back to the Shawnee Tribe. This is what activists call "Land Back." But notice the difference. In the US, it is a legal process involving federal courts, the Department of the Interior, and specific historical documents. The Interior Department’s Land Buy-Back Program has returned over three million acres to tribes. It is a bureaucratic process of correcting a documented theft.
But even in the US, it is getting more complicated with the current political climate. With the Trump two point zero administration in twenty twenty-six, there is a lot of tension between Native nations and the federal government over public lands. The American Bar Association has been tracking this. There is a push to prioritize energy independence and resource extraction on lands that tribes consider sacred.
It highlights the fact that indigeneity is often used as a shield against the state. If you are indigenous, you have a moral and sometimes legal claim that supersedes the current government's desire to build a pipeline or a mall. That is why the label is so highly sought after. It is the only way to say "no" to the modern state and have people actually listen. But it also creates a hierarchy of citizenship. If you are indigenous, you have rights that a non-indigenous citizen does not have. That is a hard sell in a liberal democracy that is supposed to treat everyone equally.
And that brings us back to the "Famous Four." The four countries that originally opposed the UN declaration on indigenous rights in two thousand seven. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The textbook examples of settler-colonial states. They eventually signed on, but their initial opposition was telling. They knew that if the word "indigenous" was given real legal teeth—if it meant that the "first-in-time" group had a veto over the state—their own domestic land titles would be in jeopardy. They were terrified of the very concept they now pay lip service to.
So the very states that define the modern world are the ones most threatened by the concept. It shows that indigeneity isn't just a Middle Eastern problem. It is the foundational tension of the modern era. How do you build a stable state on land that was taken from someone else? And Daniel’s prompt asks the ultimate question: if we go back far enough, wasn't all territory taken by force?
That is the historical reality that modern discourse tries to sanitize. We have this idea of the "noble indigenous person" who lived in perfect harmony with the land until the evil Europeans showed up. The reality is that human history is a bloody story of migration, conquest, and displacement. The Anglo-Saxons took England from the Britons, who took it from someone else. The Aztecs conquered their neighbors. The Comanche expanded their empire across the Great Plains by force, displacing other tribes. Every square inch of inhabited earth has been fought over.
So if everyone is a conqueror, is anyone indigenous? Or does the label only apply to the person who lost the last war?
That is exactly what the José Martínez Cobo definition from the nineteen-eighties suggests. Martínez Cobo—pronounced mar-TEE-nezz CO-bo—was the UN Special Rapporteur who said indigeneity requires a "non-dominant status." You have to be the group that was conquered or marginalized to keep the label.
Ah, so it is not about who was there first; it is about who is currently out of power.
That is the cynical way to look at it. If the Palestinians had won in nineteen-forty-eight and established a dominant state, would they still be called indigenous by Western academics, or would they just be the "dominant national group"? Because the Jews are in power in Israel, they are seen by the West as the settlers, even though they have the older historical claim and the genetic link. The label "indigenous" has become synonymous with "victimhood" in the modern political imagination.
Which is why it feels so offensive to Jews when it is denied to them. They spent two thousand years as the ultimate victims of history, being persecuted in every country they fled to, always being told they were foreigners. Then they finally return to the one place they were originally from, and the world tells them, "No, you are the foreigners here, too."
It is a double erasure. You are a foreigner in Europe because you are from the East, and you are a foreigner in the East because you came from Europe. It is a logic that leaves a people with no place on earth where they are allowed to be at home. This is why the "settler-colonial" framework feels like a weapon to them—it is an attempt to delegitimize the only place where they are not a minority.
And that brings us to the Trump administration’s stance on this in twenty twenty-six. There is a clear rejection of the international academic framework that uses settler colonialism to delegitimize US allies. The view from the current White House seems to be that national sovereignty and historical ties matter more than the latest sociological theories from a university in Australia. They are essentially saying, "We are not going to let you use these labels to deconstruct our allies or our own history."
It is a return to a more traditional view of history. It says that if a people have a historical, religious, and genetic tie to a land, and they have the strength to maintain a state there, that is the end of the conversation. The academic attempt to deconstruct that using the indigenous label is seen as a hostile political act, not a search for truth.
I think we need to talk about the Palestinians for a second, though. Because if we accept the Jewish claim, we cannot just ignore the fact that the Palestinians are also genetically and historically tied to the land. They are not just "Arab invaders" from the seventh century.
No, they are not. And that is what the twenty twenty-four Technion study showed. They are the descendants of the people who stayed. When the Romans expelled the Jews, some stayed and eventually converted to Christianity or Islam. They are, in many ways, the brothers of the Jews who left. The tragedy isn't a settler versus a native. It is a civil war between two branches of the same family who have forgotten they are related.
And both sides use the term "indigenous" to try and erase the other. The Palestinian side uses it to say the Jews have no right to be there. The Jewish side uses it to say this was always ours and you are just squatters. Both are using a half-truth to justify a total exclusion.
So what is the takeaway for someone listening to this in twenty twenty-six? When you see the word "indigenous" in a headline, what should your first question be?
Your first question should be: what is the speaker trying to exclude? Because the word is almost never used to build a bridge; it is used to build a wall. If someone calls the Jews colonialists, they are excluding three thousand years of history and a massive amount of genetic data. If someone says Palestinians have no indigenous rights, they are excluding over a thousand years of continuous habitation and their own genetic roots in the soil.
We also have to be honest about the fact that history does not have a reset button. We cannot go back to the single-cell organism, and we cannot go back to the year seventy A.D. We have to deal with the world as it is now. In the US, that means honoring treaties and finding ways to return land where possible, like at Spirit Lake. In Israel, it means recognizing that you have two indigenous peoples who are not going anywhere.
It is about moving from "who was here first" to "how do we share the land now." But that doesn't sell newspapers, and it doesn't get you clicks on social media. It is much easier to scream "settler" or "colonist."
If we want to actually understand the world, we have to be willing to look at the paleogenomics and the legal history and admit that the labels we use are often too small for the reality they are trying to describe. Indigeneity is not a binary. It is a spectrum of connection. And on that spectrum, both groups in the Middle East are off the charts.
I am still stuck on that purity trap idea. The moment we start saying you need a certain percentage of DNA to have a right to a land, we have lost the plot. That is the opposite of a free society. It is the definition of tribalism. And the irony is that the people who use the indigenous label most aggressively are often the ones who claim to be the most progressive. They are using the most ancient, tribal logic to push what they think is a modern agenda.
It is a weird paradox. We are using the science of the future, like high-resolution DNA sequencing, to litigate the grievances of the Bronze Age. We are using twenty twenty-six technology to argue about who was standing on a hill in twelve hundred B.C.
Before we wrap up, I want to touch on the danger of using history as a weapon for present-day dispossession. If the goal is peace, then proving your neighbor is a stranger is the worst way to start. Whether it is in North Dakota or the West Bank, the obsession with "who was here first" often serves as a justification for "who gets to kick whom out next."
That feels like a good place to leave it. We should probably mention for anyone who wants to go deeper on this that we did a whole episode on the colonialist myth back in episode one thousand nineteen. It pairs really well with this discussion if you want to see how that specific label has been used to frame the conflict over the last few decades.
Definitely worth a listen. And if you are interested in the internal dynamics of identity within Israel, episode twelve sixty on the Arab-Israeli identity in the post-October seventh world is another great deep dive into how these labels feel on the ground.
This has been a heavy one, but that is why we do the show. Thanks for the prompt, Daniel. It definitely pushed us into some uncomfortable territory, but that is where the truth usually hides.
That is the goal. Thanks as always to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping the gears turning behind the scenes.
And a big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power the AI research and generation for this show. We could not do these deep dives into paleogenomics and international law without that kind of compute.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this exploration of the messy intersection of genetics and politics, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It really does help other people find the show and join the conversation.
Find us at myweirdprompts dot com for the full archive and all the ways to subscribe.
We will be back soon with another prompt. Until then, stay curious.
See ya.
