I use this term to describe a specific perspective about being Indigenous. Unlike Ward Churchill's use of the term, I see Indigenist in more tempered and less idealistic terms; that is, it is an outlook about my identity, re-covered from beneath the layers of genocide, oppression, domination, racism, and marginalization that has acted upon me, my life, and my environment for centuries.
Indigenist is this outlook about myself, my place in society, and relationship with the world and its inhabitants. It is focused primarily on the necessity of maintaining relations and being restored to relations previously severed. In other words, it's a knowledge of who I am, as Dine' - as a child of Saa Naaghai Bik'e Hozhoo (SNBH). This out look demands a measure of vigilance: being chary of processes of domination and eradication, but motivated by a sense of restoring relations to not only Indigenous people, but all people.
That certainly has a tone of romanticism, but it is my notion and understanding of Indigenist.
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