You can drive for hours across northern Scandinavia and see nothing but forests, rivers, and open sky. The roads are smooth, the towns are quiet, the prosperity seems effortless. Nothing appears to be missing. That is the point.
Somewhere beyond the road, reindeer herds move across land that has been used for centuries. Not owned, not mapped in the way states prefer, but lived on, remembered, depended upon. Occasionally, the herds stop. A new mining road cuts through their path. A wind farm rises right where migration routes once ran. Permits have been granted. Progress secured. The people who depended on that land were not consulted. They are still there. But they are easy not to see. And our minds are built to make that easier still.
More than 476 million Indigenous people live in over 90 countries, maintaining distinct cultures, languages, and political systems (United Nations, 2021). Their territories safeguard some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, often more effectively than state-managed protected areas (IPBES, 2019). Their political claims are neither new nor quiet. However, in the stories that modern democracies tell about themselves, Indigenous peoples appear only at the edges: a mention, a symbol, a footnote. Not because they are invisible. But because we have learned how not to look.
The cognitive machinery behind this blindness is well documented. Kahneman and Tversky (1973) showed that we judge the importance of events by how easily they come to mind. This is called the availability heuristic. What is vivid, recent, and emotionally charged dominates our attention. What is slow, dispersed, and geographically remote does not. Indigenous dispossession is all three. It unfolds across decades, across continents, across legal systems too complex for headlines. It does not explode. It accumulates. And what accumulates rarely feels urgent, so it slips into what Slovic (1987) called the background of acceptable risk: not unknown, not denied, just quietly tolerated.
Slovic later pushed the argument further. In what he called “psychic numbing,” he showed that our empathy does not grow with the scale of suffering, it shrinks (Slovic, 2007). We respond to a single, identifiable victim. We shut down at millions. When 476 million people can be simultaneously counted and ignored, the problem is not a lack of information. It is a failure of feeling, built into how we process numbers.
The Sámi people of northern Europe illustrate this pattern precisely. In 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that two wind farm developments on the Fosen peninsula violated Sámi reindeer herding rights, a landmark decision that acknowledged the harm in the clearest legal terms (Fjellheim, 2023). Yet more than two years after the ruling, the turbines remained standing. The government acknowledged the violation, expressed its commitment to finding a solution, and continued generating electricity. The Sámi had won in court and lost in practice. Recognition was granted; material reality did not follow. The case received brief international attention before fading from the news cycle, too slow, too procedural, too foreign to sustain public interest.
The political consequences follow naturally. In Canada, pipeline protests on Indigenous land are often reframed as environmental disputes, easier to categorise, easier to contain. In Brazil, resistance to deforestation becomes “opposition to development.” In Australia, Aboriginal communities surface in public discourse mainly through statistics of disadvantage, rarely as political actors shaping the present. What cannot be absorbed into the dominant narrative is simplified. What cannot be simplified is reduced to symbol. Over time, absence becomes normal.
And here lies the deeper trap. Modern democracies do not ignore Indigenous peoples entirely. They acknowledge them. Ceremonies are held. Apologies are issued. Cultural heritage is celebrated. These gestures matter, but they have limits. As Fraser (1995) argued, recognition can become a substitute for redistribution, a way of addressing injustice symbolically while leaving material arrangements intact. Indigenous nations are welcomed into the story, but rarely as its authors. Participation is granted; control remains elsewhere. Inclusion without power is not inclusion. It is management.
In 2023, Australia held a national referendum on whether to establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, an advisory body that would allow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to have a formal say on policies affecting them. The proposal was not for a veto, not for sovereignty, not for reparations. It was for the right to be consulted. It was rejected. The campaign against it invoked concerns about constitutional complexity and national unity, but the result illustrated Fraser’s point with uncomfortable clarity: even the most modest form of structural inclusion can be framed as a threat when the status quo is built on its absence (Davis and Williams, 2021).
In parts of Latin America, Indigenous activists defending land and environmental rights face threats, violence, and assassination (Global Witness, 2023). These events are reported, briefly, before dissolving into the wider current of news. Each case is local, each case is containable, and each case, taken alone, is not enough to disrupt the broader narrative. Taken together, they form a pattern. But it is exactly the kind of pattern we are built to miss: slow, dispersed, and emotionally muted.
The information is already there. Reports are published, data collected, cases documented. The gap is not one of knowledge but of attention. And attention, as behavioural science has shown us, is not distributed fairly. It follows what is vivid, what is recent, what fits the story we already believe. Indigenous nations speak, litigate, and organise; clearly, repeatedly, for decades. But they do so in a frequency the dominant political system was not built to hear.
Like a low sound that most people never notice, once you become aware of it, it often becomes difficult to ignore. The question is not whether the sound is real. It is whether we are willing to change what we are listening for.
References
Fraser, N. (1995) ‘From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a “post-socialist” age’, New Left Review, I(212), pp. 68–93. https://doi.org/10.64590/4rl
IPBES (2019) Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Bonn: IPBES Secretariat.
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1973) ‘Availability: a heuristic for judging frequency and probability’, Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), pp. 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9
Slovic, P. (1987) ‘Perception of risk’, Science, 236(4799), pp. 280–285. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.3563507
Slovic, P. (2007) ‘“If I look at the mass I will never act”: psychic numbing and genocide’, Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), pp. 79–95. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1017/S1930297500000061
United Nations (2021) State of the world’s indigenous peoples. New York: United Nations.
Davis, M. and Williams, G. (2021) Everything You Need to Know About the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Sydney: UNSW Press.
Fjellheim, E.M. (2023) ‘You can kill us with dialogue: critical perspectives on wind energy development in a Nordic-Saami green colonial context’, Human Rights Review, 24(1), pp. 25–51. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-023-00678-4
Global Witness (2023) Standing Firm: The Land and Environmental Defenders on the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis. London: Global Witness.
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