American Settler Colonialism: A History Read online

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  Introduction: Settler Colonialism, History, and Theory

  This book analyzes settler colonialism over the sweep of Euro-American history. It is neither a simple narrative of conquest nor a study devoted solely to ferreting out indigenous agency within the colonial encounter. The narrative instead identifies ambivalences—the myriad ways in which both the “colonizer” and the “colonized” reconfigured their identities as they traded, allied, assimilated, negotiated, resisted, and otherwise carved out “third spaces” within the colonial encounter. Despite these ambivalences, American settler colonialism ultimately drove an ethnic cleansing of the continent.1

  I employ the trope of ambivalence as a framework both to incorporate Indian agency and to address the complexity of the colonial encounter. Borderlands history emphasizes local and regional studies and the distinctiveness of each colonial situation. There was no single “frontier,” of course, but rather many borderlands with fluid geographic boundaries. Mixed ethnicities and convoluted identities, contestation over sovereignty, and varieties of cultural, economic, and social change characterized the borderlands. Yet underlying the history of all regions was dispossession of the indigenous residents backed by violence.

  In the end, settler colonialism was a zero-sum game. Settlers—operating from the bottom up but backed by all levels of government—would accept nothing less than removal of Indians and complete control of the land. As they carried out Indian removal across the breadth of the continent, Americans internalized a propensity for waging indiscriminate violence against their savage foes. Born of settler colonialism, this boomerang of violence would play out over the sweep of US history and help define an “American way of war” in the process.2

  This study flows from the premise that the United States should be perceived and analyzed fundamentally as a settler colonial society. The American “imperial settler state” originated in the context of Indian removal and forged powerful continuities over space and time. American history is the most sweeping, most violent, and most significant example of settler colonialism in world history. American settler colonialism evolved over the course of three centuries, resulting in millions of deaths and displacements, while at the same time creating the richest, most powerful, and ultimately the most militarized nation in world history.3

  Postcolonial Studies

  This book situates itself within postcolonial studies, a term that requires contextualization. The absence of the hyphen distinguishes “postcolonial” from “postcolonial,” a term that might suggest, say, the study of India in the aftermath of British colonialism, or Indonesia following the departure of the Dutch. Hence “postcolonial” does not impart a temporal meaning in the way that the hyphenated “post-colonial” might bring to mind post–World War II decolonization. “Postcolonial” relates to colonialism, to be sure, but in much more expansive ways than the hyphenated form.4

  Postcolonial studies link the colonized past with the present and the future, thereby facilitating analysis over a longue dureé5 of history. The “postcolonial era” is in a sense timeless, thus challenging the historian’s penchant for tidy periodizations, insofar as while there are beginnings, there is no end; the legacies of colonialism persist. The field facilitates comparative studies, as colonialism was an international phenomenon that profoundly influenced (and continues to influence) the entire world. Postcolonial studies blend history, culture, and geopolitics within a “context of colonialism and its consequences.” They encourage efforts “to look critically at the world and the knowledge and representations that have been made about it.”6 Because postcolonial studies have been defined and used in different ways, one must be wary of those who either condemn or heap praise upon it.7

  Postcolonial critique draws upon classic theorists including Frantz Fanon, who is sometimes credited with “inventing” postcolonial studies. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon identified a “massive psycho-existential complex” under colonialism, within which “The black man is not a man … for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.”8 Fanon’s exploration of “the various attitudes that the Negro adopts in contact with white civilization”—the white mask over the black skin—stimulated postcolonial analysis, inspiring a virtual subfield dubbed “critical Fanonism.” In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a more revolutionary Fanon inspired anticolonialism as well as the black power movement with his advocacy of violent resistance to colonial oppression. According to Fanon, the West—including the United States, a former colony that “became a monster”—had nothing to offer to true liberation struggles, and he advised, “Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them.”9

  In Discourse on Colonialism (1950) Amie Césaire preceded Fanon in emphasizing the ways in which the colonizer destroyed the identity of the colonized through “thingification.” The colonized person could not be an individual but rather was a “thing”—a savage, a barbarian, a nigger, and so on. Colonization thus worked to “decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word.” Similarly, Albert Memmi argued that colonized people were perpetually degraded as the colonizer “emphasizes those things which keep him separate,” precluding the evolution of “a joint community.”10

  Building on the work of these classic theorists, as well as on the philosophy of Michel Foucault, Edward Said extended the analytic framework by introducing the concept of “Orientalism.” Said showed how literary discourse established a powerful binary between Western modernity—viewed as rational, progressive, manly, and morally and racially superior—and the non-Western other, typically represented as heathen, primitive, treacherous, and de-masculinized. Orientalism shifted attention to the ways in which “colonial knowledge” shaped the “encounter” between the metropole and the periphery in a variety of global settings.11

  Colonial Ambivalence

  Going beyond black skin and white masks, the colonizer and the colonized, Homi Bhaba identified ambivalence within the colonial encounter. Drawing insight from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s seminars on the formation of individual identity, Bhaba destabilized the sharply drawn binary between the colonizer and the colonized. Bhaba explained that the supposedly all-powerful colonist actually depended on the supposedly totally subservient colonized subject in order to formulate his own identity (e.g., “I am white and civilized, he is brown and savage”). Rather than being fixed or monolithic, colonial identities therefore were constructed, unstable, and required constant repetition and affirmation in order to assert them as being real. Bhaba’s insight illuminated a “third space” between the colonizer and the colonized, opening the way for considerations of hybridity within the colonial encounter.12

  Critical to Bhaba’s analysis was the ambivalence inherent in the colonizer’s desires as well as the indigene’s capacity for resistance. The colonizer desired the colonized other, for example for his attunement with nature or sexual liberation, and yet was repulsed by his primitiveness and the dangers that he posed. The slippages and uncertainty within the colonizer’s identity, including taking on some of the characteristics of the “savage,” produced anxiety and instability. At the same time, ambivalence enabled the colonized other the capacity for agency and resistance because the relations were not as fixed as they appeared to be, but rather were inherently unstable and malleable. Bhaba argued that through, for example, mimicry or mockery the indigene could appear to embrace the colonizer’s authority or display his contempt for it. The colonized subject could also appropriate or adapt to the colonizer’s resources and knowledge for his or her own uses and benefit. The supposedly helpless colonized subject thus had the capacity to cultivate, as Bhaba put it, “strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power.”13

  On the North American borderlands, colonial ambivalence complicated relations between settlers and indigenes. Masses of Americans empathized with Indians, condemned trea
ty violations and aggression against them, and strove to shepherd them to civilization and salvation. Almost none of these people, however, perceived Indians as having legitimate claims to occupy colonial space. They often expressed sympathy for Indians even as they advocated removing them from their homelands in order to “save” them. Countless numbers of Indians went a long way toward accommodating Euro-Americans by trading and interacting with them, negotiating and allying with them in warfare, converting to their religions, and showing a willingness to share space.

  The persistence of destabilizing ambivalences and uncertainties ultimately could only be addressed through the virtual elimination of the indigene. Arriving in massive numbers, Euro-Americans assumed entitlement to the land and demanded total security from the threat of indigenous resistance. By occupying “middle ground” with Euro-Americans, Indians destabilized the colonizer’s identity and his presumed providential destiny to inherit the land. This persistent rupturing of the colonialist fantasy combined with “savage” anticolonial resistance had a traumatic impact on the colonizer. Euro-Americans thus engaged in often-indiscriminate violence aimed at fulfilling the self-serving vision of Indians as a “dying race.”

  Borderland studies and postcolonial studies have focused mostly on the indigenes and the complexities of local situations. But a history focused overwhelmingly on indigenous peoples and their experiences is one-dimensional. A history of settler colonialism must by definition also “focus on the settlers, on what they do, and how they think about what they do.”14 In this study I attempt to probe into the psyche, the ambivalences, and the resort to violence of the colonizer as well as the colonized. The analysis encompasses the complexity of the colonial encounter but suggests that ambivalence and hybridity created unwanted contingencies and psychic anxieties that tended ultimately to be reconciled through violence.

  Settler Colonial Studies

  The central arguments of this book are framed by settler colonial studies, a relatively recent and cutting-edge field of inquiry. “Settler colonialism as a specific formation has not yet been the subject of dedicated systematic analysis,” Lorenzo Veracini notes.15 Academic conferences in 2007 and 2008, followed by the launching of a journal dedicated to settler colonial studies, have propelled the new field forward.

  Settler colonialism refers to a history in which settlers drove indigenous populations from the land in order to construct their own ethnic and religious national communities. Settler colonial societies include Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. What primarily distinguishes settler colonialism from colonialism proper is that the settlers came not to exploit the indigenous population for economic gain, but rather to remove them from colonial space. Settlers sought “to construct communities bounded by ties of ethnicity and faith in what they persistently defined as virgin or empty land,” Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen point out. A “logic of elimination and not exploitation” fueled settler colonialism. The settlers “wished less to govern indigenous peoples or to enlist them in their economic ventures than to seize their land and push them beyond an ever-expanding frontier of settlement.” As Veracini succinctly puts it, “Settler colonial projects are specifically interested in turning indigenous peoples into refugees.”16

  Under “conventional” colonialism the colonizer eventually departs, but under settler colonialism the colonizer means to occupy the land permanently. “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of the native societies,” Patrick Wolfe explains. “The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.” Because it was structural rather than contingent, settler colonialism extended widely and outlasted colonialism and European imperialism. By a process of conquest and “the reproduction of one’s own society through long-range migration,” James Belich explains, “It was settlement, not empire that had the spread and staying power in the history of European expansion.”17

  Settlers dispossessed indigenous people by establishing “facts on the ground” through mass migrations backed by violence. Hungry for land unavailable to them in Europe, settlers poured into new worlds, leaving metropolitan authorities struggling to keep pace. “Mobility and a lack of supervision enabled free subjects and citizens to scout for prospects and to squat,” John Weaver points out. “All frontiers attracted squatters whose possessory occupation was difficult to supplant.”18

  The triangular relationship between settlers, the metropole, and the indigenous population distinguishes and defines settler colonialism. Settlers sought to remove and replace the indigenous population and in the process to cast aside the authority of the “mother” country. Settler colonies created their very identities through resolution of this dialectical relationship, in which indigenes disappeared and metropolitan authority was cast aside—the American Revolution being a prominent example. Thus, the ability to make both the indigenous and the exogenous metropolitan other “progressively disappear” established “the constitutive hegemony of the settler component.”19

  The speed and intensity of explosive colonization overwhelmed indigenous peoples. As Belich notes, indigenes “could cope with normal European colonization [but] it was explosive colonization that proved too much for them.” Masses of settlers brought modernity with them, as they hewed out farms, domesticated animals, and built roads, bridges, canals, railroads, factories, towns, and cities, mowing down indigenous cultures in the process. The migrants “destroyed, crippled, swamped or marginalized most of the numerous societies they encountered,” constructing new societies at an astonishing pace.20

  If “sheer demographic swamping” failed to overwhelm the indigenous people, the modern societies linked advanced technology with lethal tropes of racial inferiority and indigenous savagery to effect ethnic cleansing campaigns.21 “The term ‘settler’ has about it a deceptively benign and domesticated ring which masks the violence of colonial encounters that produced and perpetrated consistently discriminatory and genocidal regimes against the indigenous peoples,” Annie Coombes notes. Settlers could be “dangerous people,” Belich adds, “especially when in full-frothing boom frenzy.”22

  This study embraces settler colonialism as a critically important interpretive framework, but one that requires theoretical and historical contextualization. I accept Wolfe’s argument that settler colonialism establishes a structure;however, the tendency of structuralism to forge rigid binaries can gloss over historical complexity and contingency. Bhaba’s ambivalence thus provides an important contextualizing framework, one that I use to incorporate exceptions, qualifications, gray areas, and middle grounds between the colonizer and the colonized.

  Space, Place, and Law

  Culturally imagined and legally enshrined conceptions of space and place fueled settler colonialism. Outside of geography “the importance, complexity, and dynamism of space is frequently rendered invisible,” yet space, as Doreen Massey observes, “is by its very nature full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation.” Spatiality thus plays a central role in the production of knowledge and power. The way space is conceived, imagined, and framed has political consequences, for example as in the relationship between conceptions of globalization and neoliberal economic policies in the more recent past. As David Delaney points out, “Much of what is experientially significant about how the world is as it is and what it is like to be in the world directly implicates the dynamic interplay of space, law, meaning, and power.”23

  Rather than being an empty void, space in this context is heavily laden with meaning. A culturally imagined and legally sanctioned relationship with the land creates the conditions and contingencies of social relations—the facts on the ground. In settler colonial societies, terms such as “frontier,” “Manifest Destiny,” and “homeland” assumed powerful symbolic meaning, creating emotional attachments. Legal claims such as the “Doctrine of Discovery” and “domestic dependent nations” bols
tered these cultural ties to colonial space, while sanctioning dispossession and removal policies.

  Profoundly divergent conceptions of place and space thus played a critical role in the colonial encounter. Over centuries, indigenous people had cultivated deeply rooted spiritual connections with the land from which the colonizer sought to remove them. The spiritual universe of indigenous societies revolved around nurturing and preserving reciprocal relations with the natural environment. This powerful sense of reciprocity carried over into relations with other peoples. When the universe of reciprocal relations was disrupted, indigenous warrior cultures typically lashed out in a quest for blood revenge.24

  For the settlers, violent indigenous resistance in contestation for colonial space functioned to reaffirm their own powerful constructions of imagined relationships with the land. Eurocentric notions of racial superiority, progress, and providential destiny thus propelled settler colonialism. Europeans denied or derided “primitive” concepts of land use, creating a colonial binary between land wasted by indigenes and land mobilized for progress by settlers. Framing indigenous people as indolent and wasteful justified removal and relocating them onto less desirable spaces. “Europeans’ convictions about improvement and waste, their assumptions about supposedly advanced and less advanced peoples, helped make the land rush unstoppable,” Weaver points out.25

  As they linked private property and individual landholding with freedom, progress, and national destiny, under God, settlers assumed control over colonial space. Colonial ambivalence, the relative balance of forces, and alliances determined the pace and timing of the settler advance. In the end, however, settler states would not stop short of establishing their authority over colonial space through mass migration, sanctioned under their laws, backed by violence.