Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law. Natsu Taylor Saito

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      Settler Colonialism

      Settler colonialism replaces classic colonialism’s hierarchical relationship of center to periphery with one in which the settlers reject the suzerainty of the metropolitan center and directly assert control over colonized lands and peoples in order to establish a state of their own. “Settler colonialism was foundational to modernity,” according to anthropologist Patrick Wolfe.66 It is widely acknowledged that Europe’s industrial revolution and its attendant economic “development” were fueled by external colonial expansion, that is, the appropriation of African and Asian natural resources and labor.67 Less appreciated is the critical role North American settler colonies played by using occupied land, appropriated resources, and colonized labor to generate commodities and expand markets for the goods being produced in Europe.68 Individual settlers’ desire for land “dovetail[ed] with the global market’s imperative for expansion,”69 with the result that, according to historian James Belich, “it was settlement, not empire, that had the spread and staying power in the history of European expansion.”70

      In the classic colonial model, the colonizers’ primary goals are to extract wealth from the land, labor, and resources of the colony and to create captive markets for the goods they produce. The wealth thus generated is intended to enrich the colonizing power, and the colonists themselves intend to return home. By contrast, settler colonists intend to remain in the colonized territory. They bring with them a purported sovereign prerogative to establish a new state on someone else’s land; to create social, political, legal, and economic institutions intended solely for their own benefit; to determine who may or may not—or must—live within their claimed borders, and exactly how they are to live. The acquisition and occupation of the land itself thus becomes the colonizers’ first and foundational principle. “Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element,” Wolfe notes.71 Land is what allows the settlers to create and control a society of their own imagining and then, using that land and its resources, to generate the profits that enable them to consolidate and expand their sovereign prerogative.72

      The settlers’ assertion of sovereign entitlement distinguishes them not only from Indigenous peoples but also from the voluntary and involuntary migrants who come to join an existing society rather than to establish a new one.73 Thus, Mahmood Mamdani observes that settlers “are made by conquest, not just by immigration.”74 Or, as Belich puts it, an “emigrant joined someone else’s society, a settler or colonist remade his own.”75 Because settlers view the occupied lands as the site of their own reproduction, Indigenous peoples become the obstacles to the realization of their vision.

      Wolfe explained that although settler colonization relies upon the appropriation of Indigenous labor, it is “at base a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement.”76 Replacement, of course, requires the elimination of that which already exists—Indigenous peoples, along with their towns, farms, and hunting grounds; their names and sacred sites; their languages and cultures. Warfare between Indigenous peoples and colonizers is central to the origin stories of most settler societies—certainly that of the United States—but in the process of colonial expansion, armed conflict is “necessitated” not by Indigenous peoples’ acts of aggression but by their mere existence. “People got in the way just by staying home,” as professor Deborah Bird Rose aptly observes.77

      As Indigenous peoples are “disappeared” in various ways, settlers turn to strategies of replacement, and what they describe as putting appropriated lands and resources to “productive” use.78 This requires the active recruitment of a critical mass of settlers; the development of a unique cultural identity; the formation of independent structures of governance and social control, including but not limited to law; and the maintenance of military and economic power sufficient to sustain themselves in these endeavors. Settlers also perceive a need for a readily available labor force that is not intended to share the benefits accruing to the settler class and, accordingly, develop strategies to acquire and control those workers.79

      Settler states establish, maintain, and protect their dominion by subjugating Indigenous peoples, non-Indigenous Others, and “deviant” members of the settler class.80 The colonizers assert a possessory right to the state and establish legal systems designed to ensure that each population subgroup remains in its assigned place, geographically, socially, economically, and politically.81 The settler class portrays these as prerogatives of sovereignty but, as Aboriginal legal scholar Irene Watson observes, “The myth of colonialism is that it carried with it and applied sovereignty. The truth is that state sovereignty was claimed and constituted through colonialism.”82

      The exercise of colonial power remains in constant tension with its ideological justifications—the settlers’ superior civilization, their democratic and humanitarian values, the leading role they play in their own narrative of progressive human development.83 On the one hand, settler society is presumed sacrosanct and the inclusion of Others cannot be allowed to corrupt it. On the other, it needs to demonstrate, continuously, that humanity writ large will benefit from accepting its social and political structures and internalizing its worldview. The result is a constant and “unresolved tension between sameness and difference”84 that lays the foundation for the construction of racial identity and hierarchy.

      Settlers both identify with and reject their metropolitan centers of origin. They seek to distinguish themselves from Indigenous peoples, but also need to legitimize themselves as “indigenous” to the lands they settle.85 They also want to distance themselves from those forcibly brought to provide labor as well as those who migrate to join “their” society. From the settlers’ perspective, voluntary migrants range from the potentially assimilable to the hopelessly different, with the result that integration and exclusion “co-define each other.”86 The resulting tensions between inclusion and exclusion are mediated by the dynamic of difference essential to all colonial relations.87 Ethnicity and national origin are subsumed within racial identities that, in turn, are designed to keep the assimilationist vision proffered by the colonizers just out of reach.88

      These are patterns common to all settler states and they help explain why, as Wolfe concluded, settler colonial “invasion is a structure not an event.”89 The narrative framework of settler colonialism resonates with the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples, migrants of color in the United States, and all those consigned to the margins of the master narrative. It explains, in structural terms, why Indigenous peoples continue to be the poorest and most consistently ignored “racial” group in the United States, and why racism has proven so intractable. Considering the structural dynamics of racialization in the United States from this perspective can facilitate a realistic assessment of the conditions currently faced not only by Indigenous peoples, but also by peoples brought to this country as enslaved workers, incorporated by virtue of territorial annexation, or induced to migrate without the option of becoming part of the settler class. Such analyses, in turn, can help us envision a wide array of remedial options for race-based injustices.

      Colonialism and Genocide

      The narrative presented in this book begins from the premise that, notwithstanding its insistent self-identification as a land of freedom and equality, the United States was established as a settler colonial state and—like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel—it remains one today.90 Patrick Wolfe’s insight that settler colonization is a structure rather than an event means that colonialism cannot be relegated to history. We live in a society whose most fundamental relationships have been, and largely continue to be, defined by the settlers’ goals of occupying the land, controlling its natural resources, rendering it profitable, and maintaining a social order reflective of their own priorities. In other words, we live within colonial (not postcolonial) economic, political, and social structures.91

      Colonialism cannot function without perpetuating difference between the colonizers and the colonized; therefore, the social, СКАЧАТЬ