omniharmonicNeo-Indigeneity
Neo-indigeneity is a vision of cultural renewal in which modern humans reclaim an indigenous relationship to place, community, and the living world — not by appropriating the traditions of surviving indigenous peoples, but by undertaking the inner and collective work of re-embedding themselves within the ecological and spiritual realities that industrialized civilization severed them from. It is not a return to a romanticized past but a forward movement through the full reckoning with ancestral trauma, colonial violence, and the story-of-separation that defines modernity, emerging on the other side with a restored sense of belonging to the Earth.
The concept arises from the recognition that the meta-crisis cannot be addressed through policy or technology alone; it demands a fundamental transformation of the human self-understanding from isolated consumer to participant in the web of life. Neo-indigeneity names the aspiration to become, once again, a species that knows itself as part of the land rather than master over it. This requires what Benjamin Life describes as the redemptive work of stripping away inherited traumas and reclaiming the deeper prayer for Life that exists beneath all cultural conditioning — choosing to become “the ancestors who return home to wholeness.”
Neo-indigeneity is closely related to decolonization as an inner and outer process, to interbeing as the ontological recognition that self and world are not separate, and to regeneration as the practical expression of these commitments in how we steward land, community, and economy. It draws from living-systems thinking to understand that indigenous ways of knowing are not primitive relics but sophisticated expressions of ecological intelligence that modern civilization desperately needs to learn from and with.