There are no Indigenous People in the Americas

There is an unmistakable trend in progressive and environmental thinking today. All compasses point toward a focus on Indigenous people and their long experience on this continent and the discrimination they’ve faced under European colonialism. This seemingly new-found awareness has hit with such force that much of the environmental movement seems transformed into a social justice movement.

While justice toward Native Americans, Indians, Indigenous, First Nations is way overdue, we may want to step back for a big-picture reality check.

There are no “Indigenous people” in North America. Every culture in the United States, Canada, Mexico and beyond in the Americas immigrated here from somewhere else. Nobody originated in the Americas.

Human beings are indigenous only to central Africa. We all evolved from a common ancestor there about 8 million years ago. And there were many species of early humans over the eons, but by the time we left Africa and began to disperse into Asia and Europe about 2 million years ago, we were down to two species. Ultimately, we reached island continents like Australia (60,000 years ago) and the Americas (18,000 years ago) with only homo sapiens surviving. We adapted to the environments where we settled over time.

Of course, some cultures have been in the Americas for 14,000 to 20,000 years while others have only been here for decades, or a few centuries. Native people have been here for a long time, and they truly are native. But nobody is indigenous anywhere except in Africa.

Indigenous is defined as: “produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment.”  In biology, indigenous means a plant or animal evolved in or near the habitat where it is found.

Humans are an invasive species in the Americas. Like cheat grass or tiger mussels, we immigrated here and spread widely. We displaced other animals, driving many animal species to extinction before the arrival of Europeans. Things got worse for native plants and animals after European colonizers joined the original colonizers. As far as nature is concerned, we are all exotics.

I know that the Native peoples of North America have their culturally imbedded origin stories related to places here on this continent.  In many of these myths they emerged into the places where they live today. I respect those myths as deeply important and true on a deep cultural level.

Scientists understand that Asians came across the Bering Land Bridge when the climate was cold and huge amounts of water were tied up in glaciers and polar ice caps 18,000 years ago. There was a wide expanse of land where people from what is now Siberia moved east over generations and found what is now Alaska, then moved south to the ice-free expanses of the Americas. These people became various Native American tribes over generations.

Less certain is scientific evidence that people came to the Americas by boat across the Atlantic and/or Pacific Oceans within the last 30,000 years. Artifacts in Chile that are as old as the earliest North American artifacts point to people arriving in South America around the same time people were crossing the Bering Land Bridge. This boat-based migration may have happened 15,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Why does any of this matter?  Because we are all human beings and we are all destroying life on earth. All of us, including Native Americans. We are all technological people, largely urban people, and our impact on the earth only grows worse as our population increases.

Helping Native Americans seek justice on many levels needs to be done and I join that effort. But native plant and animal species need justice too, and fast, or all our social justice efforts will be washed away by big changes in the natural world that will not discriminate based on race or economic status.

Tom Ribe