[_moof]

All good points. The site is run predominantly by folks from North America, and I live in the United States, so there's a particularly North American flavor to this discussion. That's naturally going to focus on the specific experiences of North American indigenous peoples, which, at least in my reading, are unquestionably experiences of conquest. So in that context, I'm not even sure it's a proxy; it seems like it's actually at the heart of the matter. Whether it's a reasonable proxy at a global scale across all of time, or even an intelligible concept when removed from an American context, I don't know.

[throwaway894345]

Fair enough, but there are also global organizations that deal in the indigenous/other dichotomy, including the UN (which has a special department or council concerning indigenous peoples). So there’s clearly a more universal notion that does my make sense to me.