This paper explores the formulations and sociopolitical implications of the concept of “al-aṣlaniyya” or “indigeneity” in 20th century Basra, Iraq. In the context of the collapse of Ottoman rule, the 1920 British mandate and American imperial presence, and subsequent arrival of British and American missionaries in Iraq, I navigate iterations of indigeneity in Basra as a mode of embodied knowledge production beyond the nativist genealogical logic of blood and soil and reactionary mainstream nationalism. By engaging the experimental aesthetics of content and form of Mortaḍā Gzār’s Hāthā al-Nahru Ya‘rifu Ismī (The River Knows My Name) (2023), I argue that the Arabic novel conceptualizes al-aṣlaniyya as an alternative historiographic method that rewrites Basra’s history through embodied entanglements between human and nonhuman bodies. Indigeneity, as imagined in the narrative prose of an Irāqī queer diasporic writer, is racialized and gendered structure, and a relational way of life which reveals the irreconcilable tension between local communities and colonial power. I locate moments of indigenous life-making by attending to the formal novel structure, cartographic journey of the protagonist through the landscapes and waterscapes of the Mesopotamian marshes, and memorial and mythmaking practices in Southern Iraq. The novel ultimately produces an archive of embodied memory. It rewrites the colonial and extractive history of Basra from the embodied experience of indigenous encounters between human and ecology. By drawing on the frameworks of Hisham Aïdi’s problematization of “indigeneity,” Naveeda Khan’s “chars,” or sandbars, and Anna Tsing’s “conditions of precarity,” I demonstrate how indigeneity is a self-reflexive construct which both problematizes colonial racial discourse in tandem with global capitalism. Yet, it is also at risk of being weaponized as an essentialist orientalist tool that dichotomizes native and colonist, desert and sea, and history and myth, which are co-opted by nationalist claims to an authentic “Arab” identity and narrative of modern progress in Iraq. Indigeneity, then, renders a decolonial historiography that rethinks categories of race, gender, and religion through bodies.