Who was here first? The two meanings of ‘Indigenous’ in Europe
The piece traces how the word 'Indigenous' carries two contradictory meanings in Europe: a romanticized, imported version from American pulp fiction and Westerns, and a homegrown 'autochthonous' nativism used to rank whose ancestors arrived first on a given patch of soil.
It walks through Karl May's fictional Apache hero Winnetou, decades of European Western comics and films, and Yugoslavia's socialist-era embrace of anti-colonial solidarity narratives, arguing these cultural products shaped generations of readers across the Balkans and beyond.
The uncomfortable turn is the 1990s, when many of the same people raised on brotherhood-and-unity storytelling and sympathetic portrayals of conquered peoples went on to embrace or enable nationalist politics built on exactly the exclusionary logic their childhood comics seemed to reject.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.