Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law. Natsu Taylor Saito
and non-Indigenous Others run the risk of rendering settler colonial institutions invisible while simultaneously reinforcing them.105 As Veracini explains, “The colonising settler can disappear behind the subaltern migrant” and settler states “can then be recoded as postcolonial migrant societies.”106
This danger must not be ignored or minimized. It need not, however, preclude development of accurate analyses of structural racism in the United States through particularized inquiries into the ways in which the settler class—defined as those who came with, and still live with, the presumption that this is their country—has facilitated the migration, voluntary or involuntary, of persons it never intended to fully incorporate into American society and developed a panoply of social institutions to ensure that non-settler migrants remain marginalized and subordinated. Such endeavors can help us understand the significance of the differences between the treatment of Indigenous peoples and the treatment of non-Indigenous Others, and how these distinctions are rooted in the diverse purposes served by various segments of the population over whom the settler class asserts hegemonic control.
The choice faced most immediately by non-Indigenous people in the United States is not necessarily “stay or leave,” but whether we are choosing to function as colonizers or to consciously pursue decolonization.107 The dominant narrative attempts to disappear Indigenous peoples and to convince the rest of us that we are simply part of a “nation of immigrants.” In that construction, the well-being of non-Indigenous people of color is enhanced by the consolidation of settler state hegemony. If, however, we understand the persistence of racialized injustices and disparities as reflective of the dynamic of difference essential to the maintenance of a colonial state, and accept that the subjugation of so-called racial minorities is rooted in the displacement of Indigenous peoples, we may see that Indigenous struggles for self-determination are, in fact, our struggles, too.
4
Land and Indigenous Peoples
In order to be a successful settler colony, one must commit genocide against the traditional owners of the land.
—Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
In the Angloamerican master narrative, the United States represents the culmination of Western civilization, and Western civilization, in turn, embodies the highest stage of human development. The narrative is embedded in a worldview that presumes its own universality, sees human history as linear and progressive, defines progress in terms of human dominion over the natural world, and constructs hierarchies of peoples based upon their level of “development.” As the origin story of the settler state, it begins with European colonizers and unfolds as a tale of their triumph over all enemies, including the “wilderness.” A primary theme is territorial control, for land “is not merely a component of settler society but its basic precondition.”1
Securing its land base has been and remains integral to the United States’ establishment and expansion, the creation of its wealth and power, and the maintenance of its global hegemony. This is why the cry of “border control” has such resonance among those who see their interests aligning with those of the state. The central narrative is also, of course, a story about people, but only as seen through settler eyes. The primary actors are European colonizers and their descendants—particularly male settlers, in accordance with their patriarchal worldview.
Indigenous peoples are problematic to this narrative. Their very existence calls into question the legitimacy of settler occupation and, thus, their nations have been targeted for destruction, containment, and conceptual disappearance. As Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham put it, “The settlers must consume us. There is no one to challenge their ownership except ourselves, which of course cannot be allowed.”2 The appropriation of land and natural resources thus “requires the elimination of the owners of that territory, but not in any particular way.”3 This is a foundational premise of American history, a reality that—as Derrick Bell noted about the intractability of racial subordination—“many will wish to deny, but none can refute.”4 At this point it is tempting, at least to many non-Indigenous people, to say, “Yes, yes, we know it was ugly, but it’s all in the past and we just need to move on.” Exasperated by being told “Don’t go there” when she talks about race, Korean American comedian Margaret Cho responds, “I live there. I bought a house there.”5 We, too, live there—here—and we cannot deconstruct the racism that permeates American society without being willing to confront its origins and the functions it continues to serve.
How the United States acquired and maintains its territorial base is rarely subjected to close scrutiny. Among non-Indigenous people, some attribute this to the belief that there is no point in feeling guilty about things we cannot change. However, if we really could not change anything it is unlikely that the resistance would be so adamant. It is the possibility of fundamental change that makes “going there” scary, tempting us to simply accept colonial occupation as a given, rather than to consider the implications of decolonization. A functional analysis that begins with space—the acquisition and maintenance of territorial control—is critical to understanding and countering the strategies that have been and continue to be used to keep all those deemed Other literally and figuratively “in our place.” The exploitation of non-Indigenous peoples of color forced or induced to migrate to the United States required land, the “basic precondition” of settler society, and the institutionalized racism we live with today originated in the strategies utilized to occupy Indigenous lands.
This chapter lays the foundation for an analysis of the racial subordination of non-Indigenous Others by summarizing some of the strategies employed by American settlers to occupy the land, appropriate its resources, and exercise their claimed sovereign prerogative. Lorenzo Veracini identifies twenty-six practices or “transfer strategies” commonly used by settler colonists to remove Indigenous peoples from their lands and from settler consciousness.6 Using his taxonomy as a starting point, this chapter looks at settler attempts to “disappear” American Indian nations, beginning with the “racing” of Indigenous peoples in the colonial narrative and then addressing strategies of elimination, displacement and containment, and conceptual disappearance.
Racialization
“The organizing power of the idea of the Indian as incommensurable savage inspired a new art of imperial government administered by the West’s first modern settler-state society. . . . [and] was the inaugural step in defining a white racial identity for the United States as a nation,” according to Robert A. Williams Jr.7 By racially constructing Indigenous peoples as part of that wilderness, as “beasts” rather than as fellow human beings, the colonizers could justify virtually any atrocity they perpetrated. Veracini describes this as “perception transfer,” an assertion that Indigenous peoples do not really exist, except as part of the natural landscape.8
Thus, the United States’ Indian policy began with George Washington’s proclamation that “the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”9 The relegation of American Indians to nature—and, therefore, in the settlers’ view, outside the bounds of human society—is embedded in law, as well. The Supreme Court’s defense of settler property rights rests, to this day, on the premise that Indigenous peoples were “wandering hordes” and “fierce savages,” that “to leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness.”10
Such depictions reflect a colonial strategy of conceptual displacement that allows Indigenous peoples to be excluded from “civilized” spaces. But the narrative of American Indians as “pathologically mobile and ‘nomadic’”11 goes beyond facilitating their exclusion from territory claimed by the colonizing power. It also means that “when really existing indigenous people enter the field of settler perception, they are deemed to have entered the settler space and can therefore be considered exogenous.”12 In other words, American Indians become a threat to society simply by virtue of existing. The settlers deny that “wandering savages” come from any given area; therefore, they have no cognizable rights anywhere. This is why it took twenty years of contestation for US scientists and judges to concede that the