The Indigenous: A History of the Idea

The Haitian Declaration of Independence famously refers to the revolutionary army as the Armée indigène. What did “indigenous” mean on the eve of the Haitian revolution? How and when was it adopted there? And how did its adoption there transform its meaning? This article answers these questions with an eye toward the politics of the term today. In early modern Europe, the indigenous named the relationship between land and nationhood. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the term especially came to connote ideas about Africa and the Americas. The Haitian revolutionaries domesticated and redirected these ideas toward anticolonial ends. Subsequent users in postcolonial Haiti struggled to sustain the meaning the revolutionaries intended, however. The itinerary of “indigenous” before, during, and in the wake of the Haitian Revolution reveals that it has connoted for a long time a critique of European imperialism, but has also enabled imperial government and ethnonationalist violence.