Monday (18 September) was Indigenous People’s Day in the United States.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary people tell me this resulted in an increase in the numbers looking up the word ‘indigenous’ on their website.
Here’s the comment made by their lexicographers: ‘The relevant and usually capitalized sense of Indigenous is defined as “of, relating to, or descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized.” The word comes from the Latin noun indigena, meaning “native.”’
I find that answer disingenuous at best and misleading at worst.
Let’s start with the Latin source word behind ‘indigenous’—this (they say) means ‘native’, but the truth is that in Latin in means ‘native’ not in the popular sense of some primitive tribe living remote from civilisation, but in the sense of ‘nativity.’
And that, of course, means ‘birth.’
You are a ‘native’ of wherever you are born—you are ‘indigenous’ to wherever you are born.
The rest of their remarks about ‘being descended from the earliest known in habitants’ is simply false.
It is a straightforward fact that you are ‘indigenous’ to wherever you are born.
A Jewish person born in New York to parents who migrated from Germany is an ‘indigenous’ American.
If that’s not so—then where are they ‘indigenous’ to?
Everyone was born somewhere—that makes them a ‘native’ (an ‘indigenous person’) to that somewhere.
One linguistic fiddle that has been attempted is to pretend there are two words: (1) ‘indigenous’ with a lower-case I which means just what I have said; and (2) ‘Indigenous’ with an upper-case I that means descended from the earliest inhabitants.
I think this is a cheat—not only are the two indistinguishable in spoken English (hence, the upper-case I is pointless), but it is also a false distinction that the English language does not support.
What do you think?
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