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The narratives over Karabakh have me pondering the question how long a group of people have to live somewhere before they're considered native to that area, outside of the myriad contexts of European settler colonialism.
For example, many groups in W Asia and the Caucasus say Turkic groups are invaders still, after over a thousand years since the Seljuqs first grazed their sheep in Anatolia. Qajars get called foreign/Mongolian and we've been in W Asia for 800 years. What's the cutoff? 1000?
Hazara in Afghanistan probably deal with the same narratives, given all the discrimination they face there
My conception of what majes a group native to a place (again outside of the context of European settler colonialism) is a relationship of love & respect for natural communities in a landscape, but this definition is incomplete and difficult to translate into political frameworks
And in many ways I feel like the notions of belonging to a landscape and also having a claim to a landscape are predicated on a notion of static immobility since time immemorial, which is inherently exclusionary to migratory nomadic peoples
I see the same discourses around the Fula in Africa. Highly mobile and migratory pastoralists, a lot of sedentary peoples cast them as outsiders even on landscapes they've inhabited for generations
A lot of definitions I've seen also don't really account for language replacement or groups with heterogeneous origins from a wide swathe of a continent or two
The UN's definition of "indigenous communities, peoples, and nations" also invokes "original occupants." Same issues with addressing migratory peoples. What's the time limit on "original?"
https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/about-us.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIndigenous%20communities%2C%20peoples%20and%20nations%20are%20those%20which%2C%20having,territories%2C%20or%20parts%20of%20them.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/about-us.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIndigenous%20communities%2C%20peoples%20and%20nations%20are%20those%20which%2C%20having,territories%2C%20or%20parts%20of%20them.
