Imagining ‘Our Ancestors’: Liberal Indigeneity and the Repudiation of Colonialism in Postimperial Britain

This article examines imaginative connections to an indigenous ancestry in popular British nonfiction writing on nature, landscape, and environment. It coins the term ‘liberal indigeneity’ to characterize ostensibly plural, inclusive engagements with Britain’s prehistoric past that promise to reconnect with nature and recover lost forms of identity, community, and relationality. Though animating interests that diverge considerably from the far right’s exclusionary racism, I suggest that liberal indigeneity’s understanding of ‘our ancestors’ is inflected by the coloniality it tries to reject. By overidentifying with actually existing indigenous peoples on the (ex-)imperial periphery, liberal indigeneity acknowledges the racial violence of empire but comes to terms with it inadequately by conjuring a scenario in which colonialism has made victims of us all. Drawing on discussions of white self-indigenisation in settler-colonial contexts, I suggest that liberal indigeneity is part of a similar process of racial formation where white privilege is maintained through its disavowal.