Race, settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance
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What is the relationship between settler colonial regimes and racial regimes and how have Indigenous people resisted colonial-racial rule.
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Race, settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance
- 1. Race, Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resistance Understanding Race Alana Lentin
- 2. Land “Everything in US history is about the land - who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity (‘real estate’) broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market.’ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014: 1)
- 3. Genocide “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life - or at least land is necessary for life.’ Patrick Wolfe
- 4. Settler Colonial Logic The British Empire (Settler colonies in orange)
- 5. Internal vs. external colonialism (Tuck and Yang, 2012) External (exploitation colonialism) ❖ Expropriation of pieces of Indigenous worlds; extraction for export; enriches colonizers’ societies. ❖ ‘All things native become recast as “natural resources” - bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel.’ Internal ❖ ‘The biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation.’ ❖ Uses ‘prisons, ghettos, minoritising, schooling, policing’ to ensure white ascendancy. ❖ Strategies: ‘segergation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalisation’ - both hierarchical and interpersonal.
- 6. Racialisation ❖ Relationship to land as ‘premodern and backward’ ❖ Indigenous as ‘unnatural’ ❖ Less authentic ❖ ‘Firsting and lasting’ (Jean O’Brien)
- 7. Indigeneity vs. blackness ❖ One-drop rule: blackness in settler colonial contexts is ‘expansive’ ❖ Native Americans as ‘subtractive’ (Kim Tallbear) ❖ Whites as ‘first’ “As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive” (Wolfe (2006)
- 8. Multiculturalism and erasure For multiculturalism ‘to work - and affirm US historical progress - Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture. As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they did not fit the grid of multiculturalism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate racial group’ Dunbar-Ortiz (2014” 5)
- 9. Decolonisation is not a Metaphor (Tuck and Yang 2012) “The opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common.” https://twitter.com/i/moments/edit/838787236552400901
- 10. Discussion ❖ How are our ideas about race helped by noting the differences in the racialisation of Black and Indigenous peoples? ❖ What is the relationship between immigration and settlerism? ❖ What would a politics of incommensurability look like in practice?
Editor's Notes
- The myth of terra nullius ensures as a justification for the invasion and occupation of Turtle island (and other areas of the world settled by Europeans). ‘Columbus myth’ In fact, over 500 Indigenous communities and nations (3,000,000 in the US today; descendants of original 15 m people). Parallels to other contexts - Zionism: ‘Land without people for a people without a land.’ 1801: Jefferson described settler state’s aims for ‘horizontal and vertical colonial expansion’. Dunbar-Ortiz: the colonial system didn't start with the Spanish war of 1898; the US was colonial from the outset but hid this under a rhetoric of ‘inter-state migration’ and ‘territorial organization.’ Chapter on ‘Indian Country’ describes the extent of the resistance to colonial expropriation of land by Indigenous people. Following the civil war, the colonization of the West of the country was established with 3 decades of war and land grabs during which 1.5 mil homesteads were granted to settlers west of the Mississippi. These were ‘taken from Indigenous collective estates and privatized for market’ (p. 141). So, it’s impossible to divorce settler colonial logic from the development of private property in the US. Tuck and Yang: the primary wealth of the US is the land: ‘Land is what is most valuable, contested, required.’ While, for settlers, land is property, for Indigenous people, ‘relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies.’ Therefore, for settlers ‘Indigenous people are in the way.’ Land today is construed as being ‘gifted back’ to indigenous people rather than repatriated.
- Tuck and Yang: Because for settlers land is property and a resource, ‘Indigenous people must be erased, must be made into ghosts.’ Dunbar-Ortiz: the UN Convention of the Prevention and Punishment for the Crime of Genocide applies to US-Indigenous relations. Although it is not retroactive, she argues that it applies to US-Indigenous relations since 1988 when the US ratified it. 5 criteria: 1. killing members of the group; 2. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 5. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Genocide includes ‘cultural genocide’ enabled by forced assimilation (more on this later).
- The expropriation of the land by genocide (including cultural genocide) is integral to settler colonialism. Dunbar-Ortiz (p. 6): ‘Settler colonialism is a genocidal policy.’ Particularly in the US, there has been a denial that this is a settler colonial country. Settler colonialism has been obscured by insistence on the US as an ‘immigration nation’ (more on this later). Difference between migration and settler colonialism: Both settlers and migrants move across space and may end up permanently in a new country. But settlers ‘are made by conquest, not just by immigration’ (Mahmood Mamdani). Lorenzo Veracini: Settlers found political orders while migrants enter into an already established order. James Belich: an ‘emigrant joined someone else’s society, a settler or colonist remade his own.’ 2. Settler colonialism vs. colonialism: Patrick Wolfe: Unlike colonialism (where the coloniser does not permanently settle in the new land), settler colonialism is not a master-servant relationship ‘marked by ethnic difference’ (e.g. what Fanon described in relation to the French in Martinique). Settler colonialism is a structure not an event (Wolfe) 3. The primary object of settler colonialism is the land itself, not the profit to be made from that land. So, colonialism sees the natives as indispensable - necessary for making a profit (e.g. through their labour). But settler colonialism wants to own the land and sees the natives as dispensable. Veracini calls it a ‘winner takes all project’ - Indigenous populations can be eradicated so that the land itself can be worked and possessed by the settlers. 4. Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson: the settler is caught between two first worlds - Europe - the source of their culture and authority - and that of the First Nations ‘whose authority they not only replaced and effaced but also desired.’ This tug between the desire to know the land as well as indigenous people and the determination to own the land - which means the need to deny and efface local knowledge and culture - has arguably never been resolved. For this reason, non-indigenous people in settler colonial states can still be thought of as settler colonials. Indigenous people insist that their people, contrary to the myth of Terra Nullius, never gave their consent to their land being taken. Legal structures still privilege non-Indigenous over indigenous people with regards land for example. White people still dominate government and all allied institutions and private business (e.g. mining). So, there is still no balance of power between settlers and indigenous in Australia, NZ, the US, Canada, etc. Newer migrants benefit too, although they are racialised in other ways. We all participate in the displacement of Indigenous people.
- Because for settlers, land is property, Indigenous people's cosmological relationship to land is seen as backward and as ‘unnatural’ (property ownership being cast as ‘natural’). Less authentic: Contemporary indigenous are portrayed as less authentic - this is used to justify the phasing out of indigenous claims to land and ushers in settler claims to property. Firsting and lasting (Jean O’Brien): The continent is covered with signage and monuments to the ‘first’ and the ‘last’ Indians. They are always in the past, memorialised. Their ultimate demise is seen as evidence of their weakness - a race destined to die out. This obliterates the history of genocide and forced assimilation.
- One-drop rule: blackness in settler colonial contexts is ‘expansive’ Descendants of black people will therefore inherit the slave/criminal status. Kim Taller: Native Americans as ‘subtractive’ - Indigenous people were planned to become fewer and less native over time (but never quite white). The goal of settler colonialism is to ‘diminish claims to land over generations’ While one drop of African ‘blood’ wad deemed enough to be racialised as black, the opposite is true for Native americans: Wolfe: ‘non-Indian ancestry compromised their indignity, producing “half-breeds”, a regime that persists in blood quantum regulations’ (used still to assess legitimacy in terms of tribal membership and claims on land). Whites in settler nations as construed as ‘coming first’ because they developed the land. Aboriginal people are seen as mostly dead/assimilated (Razack). Both the racialisation of Blacks and of indigenous people facilitates white settlers as ‘true and rightful owners of the land’ So, these two racialisations are dependent on each other. Nevertheless, a prime way in which a wedge was placed between black and indigenous people was through the promise of land to former slaves and their descendants, a promise that for the main part was never kept. Nonetheless, reparations for slavery as land raises critical questions about the limits of solidarity between black and native people (@HoodAcademic) The enslavement of Black people is necessary for the expropriation and settlement of the land. Raise Wilderson question.
- Indigenous people are nonetheless judged on the basis of their ability perform cultural authenticity in order to justify claims to recognition and land. Discuss with reference to our museum visit. MC emphasises ‘contributions’ of individuals from oppressed groups to the country’s assumed greatness. Therefore, indigenous people are credited with certain inventions/traditions (e.g. Thanksgiving), but this is a smokescreen serving to obscure the fact of ‘unresolved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty.’
- Show moments and then go to conclusion of the article. Guilt and shame.