This paper gives brief consideration to the relationship between the indigenous and the universal in a series of texts. It may seem surprising that the indigenous in this phrasing is opposed to the universal. The governing assumption here is that imperial powers are the bearers of a kind of universality. While the imperial power in one aspect embodies a particular interest, and can be construed then as no more than the assertion of one particular interest over another, in another aspect imperialism creates a quasi-universality, in its tendency to overcome cultural difference, and in doing so creates the ground for the emergence of universalism as such. To conceive of the imperial or dominant state in this way has a Hegelian cast, while the use of the term 'universalism' coincides with the thinking of Alain Badiou. In the light of this general framework, this paper considers aspects of the role of indigenous languages in dominant-language texts, viewing the dominant language as quasi-universal, and examining the particularising role of indigeneity as the dialectical product of the universalising process of domination, specifically in order to ask whether the indigenous, rather than resisting the dominant universal, aspires to it, belongs to it, even authenticates it