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For eons, Indigenous people have conducted their activities on Earth from a basis of needs rather than wants.
Our present activities have shifted from the needs end to the wants end of human activity spectrum. Colonizing human cultures have produced this shift that has been prevalent in European white people. Indigenous and people of color have been forced into becoming part of the colonized culture through enslavement, residential schools, immigration requirements, and what colonizers call “progress.” Indigeneity has been plagued by colonizers who have attempted to destroy their culture and spirituality by making them colonizers. Colonization is when a nation or a group of people, like the U.S., those of Europe, or the lords of industry (timber, mining, oil and gas drilling, hydro dams) has exploited another nation or group of people—either forcibly or under the pretenses of helping them—and has taken their natural resources for themselves. Whether you realize it or not, all white Europeans and many people of color have been colonized at one time or another. All humans have arisen from Indigenous roots in their ancestry, however many non-Indigenous people of today have diverged from needs of natural resources to greed of those limited resources through cultural changes that have removed them from being a part of Nature to assuming they are in charge of Nature’s resources. Indigeneity refers to the quality of a people, relating their identity to a particular area where they are spiritually and culturally part of the Earth with responsibilities for Earth’s care. It identifies that Indigenous people have knowledge and respect for their oral histories past down to them from their elders of being a part of Nature, not separated from Nature. Diverse Indigenous communities weave Indigeneity through a multifaceted array of space and time to revive identities and cultural practices and to regain or retain land, human rights, heritage, and political standing. Indigenous people distinguishing themselves culturally and spiritually from those “settlers” who came to their territory to subsequently colonize the Indigenous inhabitants and place them on reservations. The colonizers forcibly took their children from their parents, placing them in residential schools where they prevented the children from speaking their language, cut off all cultural knowledge and contact with their Indigeneity in attempts to make them “civilized.”
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