Daniel's been turning over a question about indigeneity and Israel for a while now, and this week he's handed us a name attached to it. Jason Watson, a Chickasaw citizen who came to Jerusalem expecting to confirm everything he'd absorbed about Israel as a colonial project, and instead walked away calling it, in his words, the Indigenous success story. Daniel wants two things from us. First, the longer arc of how Native American groups and Zionists have actually interacted since the founding of the state. And second, how that dialogue is being built today, through organizations like Indigenous Bridges, which Watson now runs, and others like FireKeepers International and the Indigenous Embassy in Jerusalem.
The Watson story is worth sitting with before we pull the lens back, because his starting position is the one most people never leave. He arrived around 2008 as a master's student through Hebrew University's Minerva Center for Human Rights, and he said plainly he came with an agenda. He identified with the Palestinian cause because he read it as his own story. Forced removal, dispossession, a people scattered from its homeland.
And the Chickasaw removal is not a metaphor for him. His grandparents told him about the Indian Removal Act, the forced march from Mississippi and Tennessee. That's family memory, not a seminar reading. So when he looked at the West Bank, he saw the Trail of Tears.
Right, and that's the exact analogy that the post civil rights era built. The Weinman article out of UCLA traces this properly. In the power era, after the civil rights movement, some American Indian activists looked at Jewish devotion to the land of Israel and said, that's a model for how we hold onto ancestral territory. Jewish sovereignty was an inspiration. But the same period had this third worldist current running through it. The International Indian Treaty Council, founded in 1974, tied Indigenous internationalism to the Non-Aligned Movement and to national liberation movements, including the PLO. So the Palestinian-Indigenous analogy has a specific institutional history. It didn't emerge from nowhere. It was built through a particular political alignment in the seventies.
Which means Watson's conversion story is actually a reversal of a reversal. The first generation of Native activists saw Jews as a model. The second generation absorbed the PLO framing. Watson grew up inside that second frame, went to Israel to confirm it, and then met the first frame face to face. He told his grandparents, I feel like I'm around a bunch of Indians that are Jewish.
And that line does more work than it looks like. He's not saying Jews are like Indians. He's saying the thing he thought was unique to his people, the specific wound of being a nation within a nation, is something he recognized in Israelis. His exact quote is, we will never have our homelands back the way the Jewish people do in Israel. We are a nation within a nation. For him, Israel is the thing his own people were denied.
Which is a bitter comparison for a Chickasaw to make. The Chickasaw are one of the Five Civilized Tribes. They had their own government, their own laws, their own land. They were removed anyway. And now they're a federally recognized nation inside Oklahoma. So when Watson says Israel is the Indigenous success story, he's measuring it against what the Chickasaw lost.
And he's also measuring it against what the Chickasaw kept. That's the part of the story that doesn't fit the standard settler colonial template. The Chickasaw Nation has a constitution, a legislature, a supreme court, a governor. It runs hospitals and schools and businesses. It's a nation within a nation, exactly as Watson says. So when he looks at Israel, he's not seeing a colonial outpost. He's seeing a people who did what his people were not allowed to do, which is return and rebuild sovereignty on the actual land.
Let's be precise about what he actually says he saw, because his quote about the conflict is careful. He said, what I saw in Israel was not an Indigenous Palestinian population versus a colonialist Jewish one, but rather a fight between two communities of varying indigenousness that love the same land. Varying indigenousness. That's not a denial of Palestinian connection to the land. It's a rejection of the binary.
And that binary is the thing Ateret Violet Shmuel, the founder of Indigenous Bridges, has spent years dismantling. Her trajectory is its own reversal. She was in radical left activism, antifa circles, and she names the 2009 Mavi Marmara flotilla as her turning point. She watched what happened and then watched her own activist community distort it, and she said that made her realize the power of anti-Zionist disinformation.
The Mavi Marmara detail is interesting because it's not an abstraction. She was close enough to the event that she could see the gap between what happened and what was being reported. That's a very specific kind of disillusionment. She didn't read a book and change her mind. She saw the machinery of narrative production from the inside.
And she now runs an organization that is essentially a counter-narrative machine, though she'd probably frame it as relationship building. Indigenous Bridges was founded in 2018. It started, in her description, as a small coalition of Jews, First Nations, Kurds, and Native Americans, and it's grown to include tribes spanning Asia, the Middle East, Australia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas. The goals are social, cultural, economic, knowledge exchange, and solidarity visits.
Watson found them through Instagram, which is a very modern origin story for an Indigenous solidarity movement. He messaged them saying, I'm Chickasaw, I made aliyah to Israel, I'm not Jewish. And Shmuel asked him to be assistant director. He's now executive director.
The aliyah detail matters. He married a Jewish American woman, Jessica, about ten years ago. They made aliyah in 2021 through her Law of Return eligibility. So he's an Israeli citizen, a Chickasaw citizen, and he's running a Jerusalem-based Indigenous advocacy organization. That's a very specific identity stack.
And the backlash he gets is also specific. He says critics accuse him of being brainwashed, a colonizer, or not Chickasaw because of his views. A longtime Native activist colleague blocked him on WhatsApp after October 7. So the cost of this position inside Indigenous circles is real. It's not a comfortable thing to be a Chickasaw Zionist in certain rooms.
October 7 is the hinge point for Watson. He says it profoundly intensified his sense of connection to Israel, while some of his Indigenous peers turned hostile. So the event that made him more committed is the same event that made his community more suspicious of him. That's a lonely position.
Let's talk about why the hostility exists, because Daniel's prompt names it directly. The Indigenous nature of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is a historical fact, he says, but one which arouses huge hostility and historical denial. Why is that fact so threatening?
There are two diagnoses floating around, and they're both from insiders, and they're different. Shmuel calls it mutated intersectionality. Her argument is that the woke left demands minority causes be bundled. You can't be X unless you're also Y, and one of the litmus tests is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So an Indigenous person who supports Israel breaks the bundle. They're not performing the required solidarity.
Which is why the response is to strip them of their identity. You're not Chickasaw. You're brainwashed. The identity itself becomes contingent on the political position.
And the other diagnosis comes from Harry LaForme, who's Anishinaabe, the first Indigenous appellate court judge in Canada. He was in Israel in May 2025 for the Tel Aviv University Democracy Forum. His argument is that the accusation is a projection of Canadian colonial guilt. He says Israel is cast as a stand-in for colonial guilt, a way to absolve and redirect collective shame over Indigenous suffering. So Canada, which actually ran residential schools, a hundred and fifty thousand children, about six thousand deaths, the last school closing in 1998, Canada projects its own unprocessed guilt onto Israel.
That's a sharper claim than Shmuel's. She says the left is doing a political bundling. He says the left is doing a psychological displacement. Canada can't face what it did to the Anishinaabe, so it transfers the colonial label to Jews, who are a safer target.
And he uses a legal term for it. Treaty scofflaws. He says the appropriation of Indigenous grievance by people who don't actually honor Indigenous treaties is treaty scofflaw behavior. He's an appellate judge. He thinks in terms of legal obligations. And his point is that the people most loudly invoking Indigenous suffering on behalf of Palestinians are often the same people who ignore actual treaty obligations to actual Indigenous nations in Canada.
There's a third voice worth adding, and she's Māori. Doctor Sheree Trotter has a PhD on Zionism, and her line is that settler colonialism has become a totalizing dogma. It over generalizes, homogenizes, and divides the world into saints and sinners. Her specific point from a Māori perspective is that there was always a continuous Jewish presence in the land. They kept the fires burning. That's what indigeneity looks like to her.
That continuous presence is the factual thing the settler colonial framework can't absorb. The framework requires the colonizer to be foreign, to arrive from elsewhere and stay foreign. But Jews have been in the land continuously for thousands of years. Not just as a memory, not just as a claim. As a physical presence. LaForme's line is, I don't know of anyone who can claim indigeneity more than the Jewish people in Israel. And that's coming from an Anishinaabe judge, not a Jewish advocate.
And then there's the Khoi voice from South Africa. Xami Thomas said if the Jews aren't Indigenous, then no one is Indigenous. That's a very clean statement of the stakes.
It is. Because if the Jewish people, with their continuous presence, their language, their calendar, their legal tradition, their archaeological record, if they don't qualify, then the category of indigeneity has been redefined to exclude them specifically. And that's not an accident.
Let's get to the actual historical arc Daniel asked about, because we've been in the present. What was the interaction between Native American groups and Zionists in the early decades of the state?
The early period is thinly documented, and I want to be honest about that. The strongest academic work, the Weinman piece, focuses on the post civil rights era. Before that, in the fifties and sixties, there isn't a clear record of tribal endorsements of Israel. What there is, is a quieter set of connections. Christian Zionist theology had a presence in some Native American Christian communities. The Revealer documents what it calls tribal alliances between the State of Israel and Native American Christianity, driven partly by end times theology and a sense of shared survivorship.
So the early connection is religious, not political. Native American Christians reading the Bible and seeing the Jewish return to Zion as a fulfillment of prophecy, and also as a mirror of their own survival.
Right. And then the sixties and seventies produced the political split. The American Indian Movement, third worldism, the non aligned movement, all of that pulled many Native activists toward the PLO. The International Indian Treaty Council is the institutional expression of that. It linked Indigenous sovereignty to national liberation struggles, and the PLO was one of them.
Which means the current pro-Israel Indigenous movement is not a continuation of an unbroken alliance. It's a recovery of an earlier model that was interrupted by a particular political moment. The RiverWinds, Chief Joseph RiverWind and Laralyn, they say their tribes have proclamations of support for the State of Israel and are called Zionist tribes. That's a formal position, not just an individual opinion.
And RiverWind's framing is explicitly about reciprocity. He says, many forget that during the civil rights movement, Jewish people stood with Native people. They didn't forget us, so we will not forget you. That's the moral logic. It's not based on shared theology or shared land claims. It's based on a remembered debt.
There's a Cherokee voice that sharpens the reciprocity point. Doctor Qaumaniq Suuqiina says a lasting bridge must be a bridge of the hearts. Allow them to meet and actually know a Jew so that they will know the lies told about the Jews are lies. That's a protocol, not a slogan. She's saying the relationship can't be built on position papers. It has to be built on actual human contact.
And that's what the Toronto conference in June was doing. The Building Indigenous-Jewish Friendship gathering. About seventy activists, academics, community figures. And the day before, about forty Indigenous people marched in the Walk with Israel, out of sixty thousand participants. That's a small number, but it's a visible one.
Forty Indigenous marchers out of sixty thousand. That's a rounding error in the crowd, but it's a signal. And the fact that the National Post covered it means the signal is being received.
The Toronto event produced LaForme's decolonization line. He said, Israel is the product of the greatest decolonization project in modern history, and this fact does not make it a colonial entity. That's the thesis in one sentence. The return of a displaced Indigenous people to their homeland is decolonization, not colonization.
Which is exactly the reversal that makes the settler colonial framework collapse. If the Jews are Indigenous, then their return is decolonization. If the Jews are colonizers, then their return is colonial. The entire debate is downstream of that one factual question.
And the Indigenous Embassy in Jerusalem is the institutional attempt to settle that question. It opened in late 2024, and the SA Jewish Report covered it. Watson and Shmuel were there alongside tribal leaders. The concept was originally pushed by groups like the Indigenous Coalition for Israel and FireKeepers International, and it had support from Jerusalem deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.
I want to know what an Indigenous Embassy actually is. Is it a building? Is it a program? The sources are fuzzy on this.
That's a fair question and I don't have a clean answer. The coverage shows it as a concept and a venue for events, but whether it's a physical embassy with a permanent presence or a programmatic designation is not clear from what's been published. The organization itself, Indigenous Bridges, doesn't have a standalone website that I could find. It's documented almost entirely through press coverage and podcast appearances. So the institutional footprint is real but thin.
Which is actually normal for a young organization. It's been around since 2018, it's built on relationships rather than infrastructure, and its public face is the people who show up at events. That's not a criticism. It's a description of how these networks actually work.
And the events are doing real work. The Good Medicine event in August 2025 at the Friends of Zion Museum, that's the one the Jerusalem Post covered. RiverWind was there, and he said, we lost around six million in the Native American holocaust that began in 1492. We have had five hundred years of persecution, but you had thousands. That's a statement of solidarity that also refuses to erase the difference.
It's a deliberate echo. He's saying, our catastrophe was comparable in scale, but your history is longer. He's not claiming equivalence. He's claiming kinship.
And Shmuel's framing at that event was about the information war. She calls it the eighth front, the war of perception. Her argument is that cultural exchange is a strategic communications effort. That's a very Israeli way to think about it. Everything is a front.
Which cuts both ways. If the relationship is strategic, then critics can say the Indigenous voices are being instrumentalized. Shmuel is using Native Americans to launder Israel's image. That's the accusation Watson faces when he's called brainwashed.
And the response to that accusation is in Watson's own story. He wasn't recruited. He came with hostility and left with conviction. He messaged them on Instagram. The direction of travel was his own. That doesn't prove anything about the organization's broader strategy, but it does complicate the claim that this is all top-down manipulation.
There's a detail in his story that I keep coming back to. He said he realized he'd only been considering the Indigenous consciousness of one side of the equation and not the other. That's an admission of a specific intellectual failure. He wasn't lied to. He was incomplete. He had a framework that explained one side and ignored the other.
And the framework is powerful precisely because it explains something real. Palestinians do have a connection to the land. They do have a narrative of displacement. The settler colonial framework isn't built on nothing. It's built on a partial truth that's been elevated to a total explanation.
Watson's quote handles this exactly. Two communities of varying indigenousness that love the same land. He's not denying the Palestinian story. He's denying that the Palestinian story requires the erasure of the Jewish story.
That's where the Indigenous perspective does work that the standard left framework can't do. An Indigenous person can say, I recognize the shape of this. I know what forced removal looks like. I know what it means to be a nation within a nation. And I'm telling you that the Jewish people are that too. That's a different kind of authority than a Jewish advocate making the same claim.
Karen Restoule, who's Ojibwe, has a warning that cuts in a different direction. She says Indigenous identity is increasingly being treated as a metaphor, a branding exercise, a political strategy. Indigeneity isn't any of that. It is a lived reality rooted in specific people and place. That's a caution against the instrumentalization of the category, from either side.
It's a caution the pro-Israel side should hear too. If you're going to claim that Jewish indigeneity is a lived reality, you can't then treat Indigenous identity as a rhetorical device to win an argument. The category has to be honored for its own sake, or the whole thing collapses into propaganda.
Shmuel has a line about land stewardship that gets at this. She says, for most Indigenous communities, when you enter someone else's land there's this respect and understanding, not necessarily of ownership, which is a very colonialist concept, but land stewardship. Who stewards the land. That's a different frame entirely. It's not about title deeds. It's about care.
That frame actually opens up a way to talk about the conflict that isn't zero-sum. If the question is who stewards the land, then the answer can include multiple stewards with different relationships to it. That doesn't resolve the conflict, but it changes the grammar.
The Toronto conference had about seventy people. That's not a mass movement. The Indigenous Embassy is a concept with an unclear physical footprint. Indigenous Bridges has no website. We should be honest about the scale here.
Fair. This is a small, fragile network. The reciprocity protocol Doctor Suuqiina describes, come with a gift, go through the chief, invite them to Shabbat, that's not the language of a mature institutional alliance. That's the language of a relationship that has to be actively maintained or it dies.
Which is maybe the point. The settler colonial framework is a machine. It produces endless content, endless activism, endless accusation. What Watson and Shmuel and LaForme are doing is much smaller and much harder. They're trying to build actual relationships between actual people across a political chasm.
They're doing it from a position of genuine vulnerability. Watson is a Chickasaw citizen who's been told he's not Chickasaw enough. LaForme is an Anishinaabe judge who's been told he's a tool of colonialism. These are people risking their standing in their own communities.
Let me bring in the parallel legal structure Daniel mentioned, because it's the thing that makes the comparison substantive rather than sentimental. The Chickasaw Nation is a federally recognized tribe with its own constitution, its own courts, its own territory. That's a nation within a nation, exactly as Watson says. And the Jewish people in Israel have a state. So the comparison isn't between two abstract identities. It's between two legal realities.
The legal reality of the Chickasaw is itself a product of a long struggle. They were removed from Mississippi and Tennessee under the Indian Removal Act. They rebuilt in Oklahoma. They wrote a constitution. They fought for federal recognition. They run their own services. So when Watson looks at Israel, he's not looking at a metaphor. He's looking at the thing his own nation has been trying to achieve for two hundred years.
He's honest that his nation hasn't achieved it. We will never have our homelands back the way the Jewish people do in Israel. That's a grief, not a talking point.
Which is why his support for Israel has a bitter edge. He's not celebrating Israel as a model to be copied. He's acknowledging that Israel did something his people couldn't. That's a hard thing to say in public.
The Indigenous Embassy concept is interesting in this light. An embassy is a thing nations have. So an Indigenous Embassy in Jerusalem is a claim that Indigenous nations are nations, with the standing to have diplomatic representation. That's a sovereignty claim, not just a cultural exchange.
Jerusalem is the place where that claim lands differently. An Indigenous Embassy in Jerusalem says, we recognize the Jewish people as an Indigenous nation with a right to sovereignty in their homeland. That's the message. It's not a cultural center. It's a recognition.
Which is why the hostility is so intense. If Indigenous nations recognize Jewish indigeneity, then the settler colonial framework loses its most powerful ally. The Indigenous voice was supposed to be on the other side.
The Indigenous voice on the other side is real. Watson's blocked colleague, the PLO alignment from the seventies, the current Indigenous solidarity with Palestine movement, that's not invented. It's a genuine political force. The pro-Israel Indigenous network is a counter-current, not a replacement.
Where does that leave the historical arc Daniel asked about? From religious affinity in the early period, through political alliance with the PLO in the seventies, to a split today between a dominant pro-Palestine Indigenous activism and a small but visible pro-Israel Indigenous network.
The split isn't just about Israel. It's about what indigeneity means. Is it a political category that bundles with other progressive causes? Or is it a lived relationship to land and people that has to be honored on its own terms? That's the deeper fight.
Watson's story is a refutation of the bundle. He's a Chickasaw who supports Israel, and the response is to say he's not really Chickasaw. The identity is being made contingent on the politics. That's what Shmuel means by mutated intersectionality.
LaForme's response is to refuse the contingency. He's Anishinaabe, he's a judge, he's a Zionist, and he doesn't accept that any of those things contradicts the others. His authority comes from his standing in his own nation, not from his conformity to a political line.
The Khoi voice, Xami Thomas, is the cleanest statement of the whole thing. If the Jews aren't Indigenous, then no one is Indigenous. That's the reductio. The category either includes the Jews or it's been rebuilt to exclude them specifically.
Hilbert: We counted them. That was the job. Me and a guy named Frank Delacroix, we spent the summer of 1982 driving through Oklahoma and Texas in a Ford Econoline with a clipboard and a list of addresses, counting enrolled members of three different tribes for a federal survey. The Chickasaw were one of them. I remember the housing. Some of it was fine, new brick houses with air conditioning. Some of it was not fine. We counted people living in trailers with no running water, and we wrote down their enrollment numbers, and we sent the forms to Washington. The whole thing took four months. I got paid eleven dollars an hour, which was good money then. Frank had a snout like a weather vane, always pointed toward the next dust storm. We ate at a lot of diners.
Hilbert: The thing I learned is that the numbers don't tell you anything. You can count enrolled members, you can count people who self-identify, you can count people who show up to tribal council meetings. None of those numbers are the same. The Chickasaw Nation had maybe thirty thousand enrolled citizens then, something like that. But the number of people who actually lived on tribal land and participated in tribal government was much smaller. And the number of people who had Chickasaw ancestry but weren't enrolled was much larger. So when someone says a tribe supports Israel, the question is always, which Chickasaw are we talking about. The enrollment list, the residents, the descendants, the council. They're all real, and they're all different groups.
Hilbert: Frank used to say the only number that matters is who shows up when something needs to be done. That's the actual nation. Not the federal list. The people who come to the meeting, who bring food, who vote. That's a smaller number, and it's the one that counts.
That's the measurement problem underneath the whole conversation. When the RiverWinds say their tribes have proclamations of support for Israel, the question is who authorized those proclamations. The tribal council, the chief, a gathering of members. Because as Hilbert's saying, those are different bodies.
The same applies to the other side. When Indigenous activists denounce Israel, who are they speaking for. Themselves, their organization, their nation. The claim to represent Indigenous peoples as a bloc is always a political construction.
Hilbert: The survey was supposed to settle something. It didn't settle anything. It just gave Washington a list. The actual Chickasaw Nation was doing its own thing the whole time, running its own schools, its own clinics, its own courts. The federal government counted them and the nation governed itself. Two different things happening in the same place.
That's the parallel legal structure Daniel mentioned. The federal government has one list, and the Chickasaw Nation has its own constitution and its own government. They're both real, and they don't map onto each other cleanly.
That's exactly the structure of the Indigenous-Jewish dialogue. There's the public narrative, the political alignments, the media coverage. And then there's the actual relationship building, the visits, the Shabbat dinners, the gifts brought to chiefs. Two different things happening in the same space.
Hilbert: Frank died in 1998. Heart attack in a parking lot in Tulsa. I still have the clipboard. It's in a box somewhere.
The clipboard as a relic of a failed measurement. That's about right for the whole enterprise.
The measurement fails because the thing being measured doesn't hold still. Indigeneity isn't a fixed quantity. It's a lived relationship that changes as the community changes.
Which brings us back to Watson's line about varying indigenousness. He's not trying to measure who's more Indigenous. He's saying the category is complex, and the binary is false.
The binary is the thing that has to go. That's the one idea I'd want to land from all of this. The settler colonial framework depends on a clean division between Indigenous and colonizer. Watson, LaForme, Trotter, Thomas, they all refuse that division from inside Indigenous identity. They're saying the category is messier than the framework allows, and the Jewish people are inside it.
The one thing I'd add is that the refusal has a cost. Watson lost a colleague. He's called brainwashed. His Chickasaw identity is questioned. This isn't a comfortable position, and the people taking it know that.
They take it anyway, because for them the alternative is a lie about their own history. RiverWind says there's no such thing as Indigenous solidarity if there's no voice for the Jewish people. That's the principle. Solidarity that excludes Jews isn't solidarity. It's a political program wearing an Indigenous mask.
That's the open question for the future. Whether the Indigenous-Jewish bridge can grow from a fragile network into something more durable, or whether it stays a small counter-current against a much larger political tide.
Whether the institutions, the embassy, the conferences, the exchange visits, can survive the pressure. The Toronto conference had seventy people. That's a start. But it's a start that requires constant maintenance.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing.
This has been My Weird Prompts. The human-AI collaboration podcast.
If you want to dig into the Chickasaw and the parallel legal structure for peoples who predate the state, there are episodes in the recent archive.
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