"Indigenous" in Europe: The Two Meanings of Ancestry and Belonging

• In Europe, the concept of being "Indigenous" is often split between romanticized portrayals of distant groups in pop culture and nationalist "autochthony" claims at home.
• Nationalist narratives often use "first-inhabitant" status to establish a "host" population, relegating migrants or minorities to a lower, "guest" status.
• The distinction between human rights definitions of Indigenous peoples and nativist political claims is frequently blurred, leading to the misuse of history for exclusion.

Pop Culture and the American West

• For generations, Europeans constructed an imagined "Wild West" through the novels of Karl May and, later, comics and film.
• While Westerns initially caricatured Native Americans, later films and comics (e.g., "Little Big Man," "Blueberry," "Tex") shifted toward portraying them as historical actors.
• In Yugoslavia, these themes of resistance were adopted into the local culture, which took pride in anti-colonial solidarity, yet this pop-culture engagement did not immunize society against subsequent nationalist bigotry.

The Politics of Autochthony

• Nationalist movements frequently claim "historical rights" based on ancient or medieval lineage to justify territorial claims.
• Examples include competing historiographies across the Balkans, such as "antiquization" theories connecting modern Macedonians to Alexander the Great or Serbs to the prehistoric Vinča culture.
• These narratives often employ pseudoscientific interpretations of genetics to "prove" ethnic purity and the illegitimacy of neighbors.
• When colonial history is invoked selectively—criticizing Western actions while ignoring one's own country's historical conquests—anti-colonialism is used as an alibi rather than a moral principle.

Exclusionary Nativism

• The dichotomy between "host" and "guest" extends beyond ethnic nationalism to anti-migrant sentiment across Western Europe.
• Terms like the German Gastarbeiter (guest worker) highlight how societies create permanent underclasses of people who are treated as outsiders regardless of their length of residence.
• The core issue is that "being there first" should not function as a license for ethnic domination or a hierarchy of human rights in the present day.