Must read on Substack https://open.substack.com/pub/gaelicreexistence/p/are-we-indigenous-in-ireland?r=4y4k8c&utm_medium=ios

“Who is imagined to be ‘indigenous’?
To even begin answering this question we have to ask: who is the ‘we’ that would be ‘#indigenous’ in #Ireland, and why? Magan tells us the ‘we’ is “the #Irish people”. This is a problem. There are many different kinds of people and social groups on the island we currently call Ireland. Irish Travellers, Settled Anglophone white Irish, Black Irish, asylum seekers incarcerated in Direct Provision, native #Gaelic speakers in Gaeltachtaí, migrants of many different backgrounds, to name a few – these all in part make up who and what can be considered ‘Irish’ in different ways, each ‘category’ pointing to specific historical ruptures or processes. They are only historically legible within colonial systems that created the basis for such categorisations to materialise. Not to mention townie/rural divides, Dublin belt/rest of the island divide, class divides, religious divides, the existence of two states on the island, and settler descended populations (and mixing therein!). There are many diverse broad social groupings, and none of them are internally homogenous (no group can ever be). They aren’t discretely enclosed either (they overlap). The fact that we could begin from a place of imagining a coherent “Irish people” at all points to a major issue with thinking ‘we’ could call ourselves indigenous in Ireland, particularly at this historical juncture.
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If the #people imagined to be ‘indigenous’ in modern Ireland are simply just Settled Anglophone white Irish people, then that should be self-evidently problematic. The idea that this loose cultural group/identity is ‘indigenous’ is an ahistorical position supported by racist ideas that lends well to #fascisms and #ethnonationalisms — which are on the rise in Ireland today. The idea of ‘indigeneity’ in the context of Ireland can be extended as Mallory suggests in The Origins of the Irish (2013), to include anyone that might find their home on the island, since there is no single origin of ‘the Irish’ in the first place. The mythohistorical text Lebor Gabala Éirinn tells of various successive waves of migrants and settlers as the origins of people on the island. This is getting closer to the point but it’s still explicitly missing the crucial elements of cosmology (cultural worldview) and relationality (with the land), which are likely the most substantial elements at the heart of what ‘indigeneity’ gestures to, and the void of which people are acutely feeling in their desires to be ‘indigenous’. ‘Irishness’ is underpinned by a #Eurocentric #colonial #cosmology and a denial of relationship with the land — the land is treated as an object for #human #exploitation. Claiming ‘indigeneity’ does nothing to disrupt that, but actually retrenches in it.
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In contrast to modern Ireland, Indigenous peoples don’t have ethnically dominant nation states where they actively marginalise their own traditional lifeways and those of other groups. States based on national identities (ie. nation states) are colonial. When people decide to go the state-based or nationalist route of political and social organising, they are already playing a game colonialism created, as has been happening in Ireland for well over a century. Any serious appraisal of the reconcilability of ‘indigeneity’ and modern Irish society needs to account for what being ‘indigenous’ means for living Indigenous people, and not just hang off vague, romanticised and exoticised notions of ancientness and nature connectedness. I recommend Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) for some nuance.
Indigenous people are far from being a monolith. ‘Indigenous’ is an enormously broad catch-all term. It comprises hundreds, if not thousands, of different cultural groups around the planet. Each group just like any other will have its own internal conflicts and individuals who will speak and think differently. People within this catch-all category can’t give ‘us’ permission to use the term by virtue of it happening to apply to them. The actual actions the word calls for is something that has to be worked out here in this place amongst the peoples and land it actually affects. This doesn’t mean ‘outside’ perspectives can’t inform what we do — in fact they directly inform the basis of everything I do.“