olonial 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 criminalization, impoverishment and perpetual treaty violations as suicide rates among Native youth skyrocket. Additional strategies include blood quantum laws (Indian blood laws) designed to decrease recognition of Indigenous land claims over generations, as well as laws that enable white settlers to make claims of indigeneity (claim membership in an Indigenous group).
Native poet and novelist Sherman Alexie claimed, “In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.” The racial construction of Native people continues to be embedded within the ideology of eugenics, whereby the destiny of their Indigenous identity will be diluted and disappear over generations and white settlers can more legitimately claim native status. Arvin, Tuck and Morrill emphasize that “settler colonialism must be understood as a multi-fronted project of making the First Peoples of a place extinct; it is a relentless structure, not contained in a period of time.”
Only through continued resistance have Native people survived the ongoing genocidal project of the Doctrine of Discovery and US settler colonialism. Recognizing this reality reveals what is at stake for the Water Protectors who will continue to resist big oil at Standing Rock, for it is a struggle for Indigenous survival and for the preservation of Earth itself.