 resources and self-determination (liberation).
US Settler Colonialism: “Destroy to Replace”
The nationalistic narrative attached to the Doctrine of Discovery inspired the notion of Manifest Destiny and conjured up a social imaginary where intrepid white immigrant pioneers courageously settled a vast continent that was there for the taking. The counter-narrative to this tale is best described by settler colonialism, which frames this undertaking not as a set of distinct historical events, but as a persistent and ongoing cultural, political and economic structure. In their article, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck and Angie Morrill explain:
Newcomers/colonizers/settlers come to a place, claim it as their own, and do whatever it takes to disappear the Indigenous peoples that are there. Within settler colonialism, it is exploitation of land that yields supreme value. In order for settlers to usurp the land and extract its value, Indigenous peoples must be destroyed, removed, and made into ghosts.
As a nation-state, the United States is defined by the genocide of Native people and the enslavement of Black people and would not exist without the brutal structure of settler colonialism (and chattel slavery). In fact, genocide is not an aberration of US democracy, but is instead foundational to it.
The colonization of North America by Christian whites — especially after the formation of the US — differed significantly from “franchise colonialism” (or extraction-oriented colonialism) that was practiced in other parts of the world, such as in India under British rule.
As professor Lorenzo Veracini describes it in Settler Colonial Studies journal, franchise colonialism differs from settler colonialism in that its “message to Native populations is ‘You, work for me,'” while “the settler-colonial message is ‘You, go away.'” Settler colonialism, as Wolfe puts it in the Journal of Genocide Research, “destroys to replace” by erecting “a new colonial society on the expropriated land base … settler colonizers come to stay [and] invasion is a structure not an event … to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home.” While in some instances, white settlers in US settlements enslaved Indigenous peoples for their labor, the primary goal of the US settler state was to eliminate Native people altogether.
Soon after the American Revolution, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, which claimed, “any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen.” As a result, scholar Malathi Michelle Iyengar points out, “even the lowest-status whites (Jews, Irish peasants, indentured servants) were legally white — i.e. Human — by virtue of not being Black (i.e. Slave) or Indian (i.e. Savage-to-be-vanquished).” This dehumanizing racial paradigm allowed Congress to establish that only “free white” people are eligible to be citizens in the growing settler nation and deserving of the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Despite nationalist ideologies, the social structure of settler colonialism cannot be reduced to distant and unfortunate “birth pangs” of a young nation as it strived to live up to its enlightened values and institutions. The violence of settler colonialism is reasserted each and every day of the occupation for as long as it lasts. Its violence is inherently entwined in other persisting forms of brutality.
In addition to frontier homicide, other genocidal strategies of elimination and social control characterized by the US settler colonial nation-state include systematic and state-facilitated assimilation techniques via boarding schools, child abduction, Christian conversion, forced sterilization and the breaking down of Native title into alienable individual freeholds (see Dawes Act of 1887). Elimination strategies continue to this day through crimina