Investigation: “White genocide” and “Indigenous” white supremacy

Across America, South Africa, Germany, and Israel, aggrieved settler descendants and white supremacists are claiming Indigenous roots to lands their ancestors violently colonized

“Adolf,” Adolf Hitler illustration published in the liberal magazine Ulk, 1931. Original caption reads: “The chief of the savage headhunters after the Battle of Leipzig—in full warrior regalia.” Nazi culture appropriated the '“swastika” from North American Indigenous peoples and Buddhism. This appropriation and graphic by Kalen Goodluck.

In late February, weeks after Donald Trump’s second Presidential inauguration, officials from his new administration were greeted in the White House by Afrikaner lobbyists from AfriForum and Solidarity Movement, two white South African supremacist groups. They came to ask the Trump administration for support, alleging a “white genocide” and unjust land grabs that rural white Afrikaner farmers are facing. Earlier that month, Trump declared a crisis in South Africa and quickly raised tariffs and shut off aid to the country, including life-saving HIV medication, and began an Afrikaner “refugee” resettlement program in America. Three weeks ago, the U.S. welcomed dozens of Afrikaner “refugees.”

“We Afrikaners are a proud, hard working tribe with strong Christian values. I speak for myself, and thousands of my tribe,” wrote Sebastiaan Jooste on his influential X account @twatterbaas a day after Trump created the Afrikaner refugee program. Jooste is followed and often re-posted by Elon Musk, who was born in Apartheid South Africa. “I want to say a MASSIVE thank you to President Trump and his administration for recognising the problems we are facing here in South Africa.”

In mid-May, during a visit to “reset” diplomatic and trade relations between the two countries, Trump ambushed South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, berating him about the false “white genocide” of Afrikaners.

“They want us to believe that white people are somehow not native or indigenous to any place on Earth,” wrote Daily Caller’s Matt Walsh on X and re-posted by Musk. And posting, “Also they've been in South Africa for like 400 years but they're still viewed as ‘invaders’ and ‘colonizers.’”

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Across America, South Africa, Germany, and Israel, No Frontiers has found a rising tide of aggrieved settlers, settler descendants, and white supremacists who are claiming Indigenous roots to lands their ancestors violently colonized or lands they feel under siege from migrants.

As I first reported for High Country News in 2019, white nationalists—including mass shooters in Norway and El Paso, Texas—have long appropriated Native identity for their blood and soil ideologies, beginning in Nazi Germany.

If no “Indigenous” connection to land exists, they fear, then they have no legitimate claim to land. But if their white settler ancestors conquered the land and the Native people hundreds of years ago, doesn’t that endow them with a Native identity?

Of course not. But that never stopped white nationalists, whose propaganda is laden with implicit violence to reclaim white-rule.

“Rhetoric related to ‘indigenous rights’ is an untapped goldmine which has currently been deluded and sidetracked due to ‘rhetorical contamination’ from the US,” wrote Anders Breivik, a Norwegian white supremacist who massacred 76 people (mostly teens) in 2011, in his 1,500-page manifesto entitled “The Great Replacement.” “If you use ‘white nationalist’ rhetoric you are instantly placed in the same category as Hitler.”

Breivik goes on:

We are no more terrorists than Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse or Chief Gall who fought for their people against the imperialist General Armstrong Custer. Our struggle will be a lot easier if European nationalist (indigenous rights activists) use smart and defusing arguments instead of using supremacist arguments which can be efficiently squashed through psychological warfare propaganda or by anti-Nazi policies. Yes, we are fighting the imperialistic Marxist doctrines. The only difference is now, WE are the Sitting Bulls, Crazy Horses and Chief Galls and the imperialistic Custer’s of our time is called Barroso, Blair, Brown, Merkel and Sarkozy.

During his parole hearing in January 2022, he made a Nazi salute and carried a sign reading “Stop your genocide against our white nations.”

America

Many Germans have a peculiar fascination with Native Americans, dating back to the 18th century, which German scholars have called “Indianthusiasm.” This Indian fascination was widespread throughout Germany, then Nazi Germany, and continues to this day.

The Nazis tried to claim a common racial lineage with Native tribes as both a way to claim settler ties to America as well as construct a pseudo-Indigenous identity as part of their völkisch blood and soil ideology, which tends to idealize the myth of the “original nation.” Violent American neo-Nazis like Blood Tribe and Patriot Front have since taken up this tradition of claiming a frontier identity—one of neo-pagan “tribal” roots and the other of settler American revolutionary war. Blood Tribe, with their brand of spiritual “Wotanism,” believe a kind of occult set of “Indigenous mythos” and revisionist American history that claims that European pagans were among the first to settle the North American continent by “evidence” of prehistoric “European burial mounds,” underground stone temples, and remnants of standing stone circles across the east coast and as far as Arkansas. This is a clear echo of early Nazi scholars’ claims to America.

“Recently in 1996, a 9,000 year old Aryan corpse, coined ‘the Kennewick Man,’ was found buried on the banks of the Columbia river near Yakima, Washington,” reads the Temple of Wotan: The Holy Book of Aryan Tribes.

With scant and shaky evidence, scientists and journalists speculated that Kennewick Man was not descended from ancient Indigenous peoples from the region, but was possibly a human from Europe based on the discredited and racist pseudoscience of skull shape. (According to forensic anthropologist James Chatters, Kennewick Man had a “caucasoid” shaped skull, not a Native American “mongoloid” skull.) Eight archeologists filed a lawsuit opposing the return of Kennewick Man to a descendant Northwest tribe required under federal law, arguing the skeletal remains weren’t ancestrally Native American and should be studied. In 2015, modern genome research confirmed that Kennewick Man is indeed closely related to tribes in the Pacific Northwest.

In response to an AI-generated image of white ‘trad’ women forming a hidden swastika, Matt Walsh argued white people are Native to America. “People who look like that [white] have been living in the Americas for five centuries. If five centuries is not long enough to qualify as native, then how long do you need?” wrote Walsh on X.

Unfortunately, the neo-Nazis took the name of an actual First Nations band called Blood Tribe, or Kainai Nation, located in southern Alberta, Canada.

Germany

In their 2017 English language party manifesto, the politically ascendant Alternative für Deutchland (AfD) party calls for dominance of German Christian “indigenous culture” over “degrading” multiculturalism (namely immigrant, Arab, Muslim), while several violent Reichsbürger groups banned by Germany proclaim ‘Native’ sovereignty, two of which demand “special rights” and call themselves Indigenes Volk der Germaniten (Indigenous Germanite People) and the Geeinte deutsche Völker und Stämme (United German Peoples and Tribes). Of the estimated 25,000 Reichsbürger members, about 10 percent or 2,500 are considered violence-oriented. Their Nazi-esque politics are especially concerning given the Trump administration’s adoption of the AfD’s “remigration” policy of mass deportation—what critics have called “ethnic cleansing”—and his recent plans for creating an Office of Remigration.

Israel

As historians Shlomo Sand and Zeev Sternhell have demonstrated, the myth that all Jews are Indigenous to Palestine (now called Israel) began around the mid-18th century in Europe with non-Jews, mostly Christians, and anti-semites, but is now widely accepted in the West—yet this facade began to crack after Oct. 7.

Just months after Oct. 7, Israel opened the so-called Indigenous Embassy in Jerusalem and invited Native peoples (mostly Christians) from around the world to fight critics of Israel’s settler colonial regime and to claim all Jews are Indigenous to Israel.

"We believe this is the right time to launch the embassy in order to send a strong message of solidarity from indigenous [sic] peoples around the world, that we recognise the Jews as indigenous to Israel and stand with her in her struggle against forces that seek her annihilation,” wrote Sheree Trotter, embassy director and co-founder of Indigenous Coalition for Israel, in a press statement. Trotter is Maori and an evangelical Christian from New Zealand.

The New Zealand Jewish Council praised Trotter’s work to “counter the narrative that Jews are white colonisers in Israel.” And she has done just that, writing an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post attempting to discredit UN reports of famine in Gaza. In another, she argued that “Jews have indigenous rights to the Temple Mount” (an “end times” goal for an extremist Jewish and Christian messianic movement), writing that Jews fulfill the UN’s criteria of Indigenous peoples.

Gaining the Indigenous stamp of approval from Indigenous Christian Zionists has been indispensable. Self-Indigenization has grown in popular discourse for Zionists, including from Hollywood actress and former IDF soldier Gal Gadot, who declared to Variety in March, “I’m an indigenous person of Israel,” despite her lineage originating from Poland, Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia.

“Jewish identity is not rooted in land, language, or culture,” wrote the anti-Zionist Voice of Rabbis on X. “It is the Torah, and only the Torah, that defines us as a people.”

South Africa

This anxiety of “anti-white” violence has been brewing over the past decade in post-Apartheid South Africa, with white settler descendants feeling vulnerable after losing their minority white-ruled state in the mid-1990s to the majority black South Africans who elected Nelson Mandela in their first free election. Three decades later, South Africa is still considered the most unequal country in the world, with most black South Africans living in poverty and 80% of the wealth held by 10% of the population.

Not long ago, road signs reading “Caution, Beware of Natives” and “Europeans Only” were commonplace in South Africa. Today, Afrikaner white supremacists are gaining the spotlight in Europe and America, with AfriForum’s invite to the 2025 CPAC Hungary event in May to speak about white genocide and rub elbows with autocratic Prime Minister Victor Orbán and the Netherlands’ far-right politician Geert Wilders, or have their propaganda video played in Belgium’s Flemish Parliament.

Non-Native peoples often confuse Indigenous identity with general cultural uniqueness or language, which can easily apply across cultural communities. In 2020, AfriForum lobbyist Ernst Roets posted on X:

“I’m Afrikaans, Afrikaner and an African. Afrikaans people are a language community. Afrikaners (some call us Boers) are a cultural community. Africans are home and indigneous to Africa. Afrikaners never existed prior to being in Africa. As a people, we were born here.”

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Self-Indigenizing has a long history, but has only amplified in the past decade, fed by the nationalist desire to organize the states of the world by “race” and “nation.” This self-Indigenizing tactic is an attempt to de-legitimize rights and claims by all non-whites, especially Arab and Latino migrants, and actual Indigenous peoples.

These white nationalists are exploiting Indigenous rights language, what Norwegian mass shooter and white supremacist Anders Breivik called an “untapped goldmine” to shake off the neo-Nazi label society shuns.

“There has been a giant psy op conducted for years to convince white people that they aren't native to their own homeland,” posted Walsh.

He goes on:

“White South Africans have been there for 15 generations and yet somehow they still don't count as native. White people have been in the Americas for 500 years and yet somehow we aren't allowed to call this our native land. It doesn't matter if your great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather built a cabin on this land with his own hands, it still isn't your land.”

It’s no surprise Walsh has no concept of what legally qualifies as Indigenous or Indian identity or their U.S. federally recognized tribal status—most people don’t know. But what remains troubling is the mainstreaming of white nationalist “Indigenous” claims to a “homeland” their ancestors colonized in place of actual and existing tribal nations.