Based on my Instagram post of February 2025, these (unfinished) thoughts arose while working on a series of 3D scanned objects – virtual sculptures – that are part of the series Tools (2021 – ongoing). First off: with ‘indigenous’ I mean people with a relationship to their traditional territory – ‘self-identification’, perhaps, of someone of a particular region or culture. I realise that there are many issues with the term in the context of Western Europe, and that there is an abject history of nationalism and white supremacy connected to European ‘nativeness’. My aim is to demonstrate the exact opposite. This is a thought experiment. I also don’t think I have another word that covers the concept as I lay it out here.
Left: commemorative trees, North Brabant, The Netherlands. The trees are adorned with customized bird houses and photos of deceased people. This is near a former care centre at the edge of the nature park Strabrechtse Heide. Photo AC, 2023. Right: a dead tree trunk with commemorative plaquettes on The Plot, a clearcut that was left after a spruce bark beetle ravaged our family’s forest, AC, 2020. These plaquettes remind the bark beetle’s passage. The Plot is at another end of the nature park.
What does “indigenous” mean in Western European countries like the Netherlands and Belgium? Does ‘indigenousness’ exist in the inhabitants of the region? If so, how?
Both my father’s and mother’s families’ roots can be traced back centuries to the Southeast of the Netherlands, the river Meuse and the bogs and heathlands of De Peel respectively. My family consists of generations of combined occupations: they were at the same time farmers, innkeepers, and aldermen. My last name, Crouwers, is first mentioned in a document from the 1380s: in it, a woman, Lysken Crouwers, is listed as the owner of farmlands near the Meuse. It likely meant she was a widow – which was usually the only reason a woman could become a land-owner.
In 1380, Netherlands did not exist. Lysken’s land was at the northernmost border of the Duchy of Brabant, with its capital Brussels. However, the border kept shifting over the course of the many conflicts in the wider region, lasting between the 1330s and 1450s; the Duchy was far from a unified, demarcated nation.
We are now so used to the concepts of nation states and national identities that we tend to forget that these are recent phenomena: the Netherlands and Belgium have only existed in their current constitutional forms since 1830. The contemporary unifying culture of Western Europe is shaped by an idealised and very single-sided view of the Enlightenment, and by the cultural equivalent of a cheese-grater, Christianity – the fragmentation of which regularly led to conflict and, as a consequence, migration across the continent.
Left to right: Warrior of Hirschlanden, 6th century BCE, Wildberger Mann (possibly a druid), 12th century, Holzerlingen figure with two faces, 4th century BCE. Photos AC at Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart, 2025.
Pre-christian indigenousness
Christianity took more than 1,000 years to spread and take hold across Europe, and was used as a tool for suppressing pre-Christian cultures in the process, which were portrayed as ‘primitive’ or ‘barbaric’. Only a few ancient customs have survived: famously, sacred forests or “holy oaks” live on in Christmas trees and memorial trees.
There is a cultural experience that predates our current linear and monolithic perception of European history. If we view both Christianity and the nation-state concept as colonising forces, for centuries surpressing previous folk cultures, it could mean that ‘arboriginal’ Europe might be slumbering in shambles somewhere in our landscapes, our art and our songs.
This is why ethnographic and archaeological museums are important. However, ethnographic collections rarely include pre-Christian European cultures, focusing instead on colonised regions on other continents. Including our ‘own’ pre-Christian artefacts besides those of Congo, New Guinee, or Central America would highlight their interconnectedness. It could demonstrate, for example, the role of braids and (human) sacrifices (e.g. bog bodies) to grave goods, monuments, spirits as mediators, and even hand stencils in caves worldwide.
Cultures have always shifted – they are experiments in living with eachother, and with our environments. These shifts and variations show that our current situation is absolutely not the only way to exist, and that radical change is possible – and in the light of global biosphere degradation, desirable: necessary, even.
Reconnecting with our own ‘indigenousness’ – whatever that might mean – could help Western Europe break out of our stifling inertia in the face of environmental breakdown. It is all quite existential: who have we been across our human existence? What can we become?
Graves from Borum Eshøj, three people buried in a mound, laid to rest in oak boat-shaped coffins. Ca. 1500-1300 BCE. Photo taken in Moesgaard museum, AC, 2021.
Left to right: Mannetje van Willemstad (little man of Willemstad), found in the Netherlands and dated at about 5,400 BCE. Oak. Centre: vessels, (3,000 – 5,000 BCE?). Both images taken at the Rijksmuseum voor Oudheden, Leiden, AC 2023. Right: bog body of a young woman (Elling Woman) at the Silkeborg museum in Aarhus (AC, 2021), with her elaborate braid well preserved. Dated at about 210 BCE (similar to the nearby found Tollund Man, who, like Elling woman, was believed to be hanged or strangled before put into the bogs).